It recently occurred to me that beginning with my undergraduate senior project , my work has always involved aquaculture. However, because the culturing was a means to another end, I didn’t consider it to be aquaculture.
My undergraduate senior thesis project asked if fish made choices. I learned how to keep the water clea r and keep the fish calm for my experiments, and also look for signs of infection as well as how to treat them with salt. But this wasn’t aquaculture , was it?
My first job as a research associate was to use my senior thesis methods to assess how exposure to crude oil affected this choice behavior (and how they responded to a hologram). I now had many tanks of fish to care for and kept track of all the dominance interactions in the control and treatment groups. But sur ely, this wasn’t aquaculture.
Graduate school extended my studies into the visual search behavior of fish on zooplankton. Water clarity was crucial for the studies as well as maintaining healthy fish and cultures of algae to feed cultures of zooplankton for my experiments. But I didn’t think this w as aquaculture.
My p ost-doctoral research led me to the retinal development of many different species of fish. I learned histology and molecular biology methods to study the changes in the eye. Once again, I had to rear my subject species which ranged from winter flounder to African cichlids. I have continued my study of eye development to the present day, examining salmon, lake sturgeon, muskellunge and arctic grayling. I was able to collaborate with M ichigan DNR hatcheries and facilities at Stanford University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute for help rearing the species. Yes, they were aqua culturists, but was I?
For many years now, I have been a Biology professor at LSSU. But i t wasn’t until 2011, that I advised three fisheries sophomores in a business plan competition. Their plan was to raise fish as a business. As we learned about the aquaculture industry, and its potential to address global food insecurity and water scarcity, the students gravitated to aquaponics. Their business plan won the judge’ s choice award, and they created a company, Superior AquaSystems LLC . I now supervise an active student aquaculture club that is a student sub-unit of USAS, and believe my focus is now aquacultur e. But now I realize, it was always aquaculture.