The Hatchery...

The Hatchery, SavingESTER, Est. 2020

85-95% of the worlds native oyster populations have gone, the Fal has a significant percentage of the remaining native oyster biomass, and we wanted to learn how to protect the species incase our own populations collapsed any further...

Setting up a purpose built hatchery was the only way we could see if we could create larvae from our wild native oyster brood stock.

Firstly, in 2020 we raised almost £9,000 through

Crowdfunder - SavingESTER - The Pearl of Crowdfunder Projects 

and with this we hired the purification centre at Fal Oyster Ltd, and purchased some essential equipment including microscope, flasks etc... 

It was almost unbelievable, that in a matter of weeks we had created a 'murmur' of larvae in the bins... suddenly the larvae appeared like a murmur of starlings, moving around in the water column and forming incredible patterns...

However, the excitement was short lived, and the population that we created didn't survive more than a day or two... but boy did we learn a lot... and most importantly we knew we could create the larvae, now we just needed to keep them alive...

 

We then went on to double our target, now over £18,000, so we purchased a new 20ft shipping container and converted it to an insulated and hygienic hatchery, that slightly resembles a science laboratory.

One thing we learned was that the algae concentrate we were using as feed, contained a culture that acted as a steroid and made the larvae think they were ready for metamorphosis, when they actually weren't... so our next phase was to build and culture specific live algae cells, this was a lot harder than you may think... we launched another campaign, £2,000 has been raised and we have grown over 50l from just 50ml starter culture

Crowdfunder - SavingESTER - Algae Laboratory

Then, in summer 2022, Ranger filled up the seawater tanks on a Monday, collected some brood stock from the aquaculture site on Tuesday, and by Wednesday had an estimated 3 MILLION larvae... amazingly the population lasted for 12 days, with metamorphosis usually 13-15 days from liberation, so we must have been feeding correctly, however after a seawater change on day 13 the population collapsed...

Thanks to Mic for some sound advice!