Shellfish aquaculture is dependent on a reliable and affordable supply of juveniles in the form of newly settled seed or older spat. Aquaculture growers may elect to collect spat from the wild or purchase seed from a hatchery. When both options are available, the grower’s decision is a trade-off between the increased cost of hatchery seed and wild spat collection efficiency/uncertainty. However, what market pressures lead to the development of a hatchery system if there is no industry already present? In a ‘chicken and the egg’ scenario, without a grower demand for seed, what market pressures would facilitate hatchery development?
Our research evaluated the incipient Atlantic sea scallop aquaculture industry. Wild spat collection currently supports a cottage (<1 mt annual sales) industry in Maine, however collection efficiency is low. This has spurred interest in developing a hatchery process to supply scallop seed. Our scenario analysis compared hatchery and wild spat collection economic metrics using results from a three-year hatchery research project and published wild spat collection sub-model. Our results determined that, while hatcheries could reliably compete with wild spat at annual production scales exceeding one million seed, the current annual grower demand is less than 100,000 seed, making commercial hatchery operations unprofitable. Our scale-efficiency framework can be applied to all shellfish species, particularly as climate change drives uncertainty in wild settlement higher (Fig. 1).