FISH FOR THE FUTURE
WHEN ANGLERS AND RESEARCHERS CUT THE RIBBON TO OPEN A NEW LAB BUILDING AT THE FISHERIES AND MARICULTURE LABORATORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN MARINE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, THEY WERE LOOKING FAR BEYOND NEXT MONTH OR EVEN NEXT YEAR.
BY PHIL REYNOLDS SOUTH JETTY REPORTER

Scientific snip Dr. Joan Holt, center, wields the scissors as the ribbon is cut at the dedication of the CCA Texas Laboratory for Marine Larviculture.

To you, it's a brand-new building. To Joan Holt, it's another chance to do something nobody's ever done before.

It's not as though Holt - and here we're talking about Dr. G. Joan Holt, The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute's (MSI) Associate Director for Mariculture and Senior Research Scientist - is a stranger to that. The Fisheries and Mariculture Laboratory (FAML) that she oversees has a whole string of "firsts" under its belt.

But when she looks at the brand-new CCA Texas Marine Larviculture Laboratory, Holt looks not at the past, but at the future.

Sure, FAML will continue research on cobia, the fish known locally as ling. But that's so, you know, last season. This season let's talk about southern flounder and Texas snook.

FAML partnered with CCA, the Coastal Conservation Association, when redfish were in such short supply along the Texas coast. Back then, FAML researchers managed to find a way to get redfish, the popular gamefish and dining fare, to spawn in captivity. Once that was learned, the task of carrying on the work could be turned over to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department hatcheries. The resulting fingerlings were released into local waters. The rest is history. You want a redfish? Head for Redfish Bay.

Colorful tanks in the new larviculture lab, above left, will house fish larvae that researchers hope they can convince to spawn in captivity. They face a bewildering number of variables in that attempt. Above, a beaming Dr. Joan Holt speaks at the dedication of the new building on Friday, Aug. 17.

A few years ago, FAML took up the cobia cause. Cobia also are known among anglers as good fishing, and, if the marketing can be done, could become a popular table fish.

Today, when research scientist associate Jeff Kaiser feeds the cobia in one of the big tanks, he has to drop the shrimp into the water, not hold it near the surface. Those cobia are big. And aggressive.

And when Holt, along with other dignitaries, cut the ribbon at the new lab building on Friday, Aug. 17, there were already research projects going on indoors. Cobia, of course, but also snook imported from Florida because researchers are having a hard time getting snook in the wild in Texas waters.

("We're not going to stock Florida snook in Texas waters," Holt told the crowd at the dedication. "For that, we'll use real Texas snook. Bring us some snook!")

The building was made possible by a $700,000 grant from CCA, which is arguably as interested in fisheries research as the scientists at FAML are.

Holt said it expands researchers' horizons because it gives them better control of conditions.

"We can control the temperature from tank to tank (in the new lab)," she said. "On each of these six large tanks, there's a heat pump."

It's also important to control the content of the water: "We have sand filters, UV (ultra-violet light) filters, we can set the salinity (salt content) of the water where we want to, to test for survival and growth rates," Holt said.

Cobia fingerlings, left, flock around a handful of food scattered in one of the huge tanks at the new laboratory. Researchers want to reduce or even eliminate the fingerlings' dependence on fish meal or fish oil, both of which are expensive and reduce other fish stocks. Right, food for the fingerlings is "brewed" in towers of clear plastic. Bottom, researcher Jeff Kaiser keeps hands well clear of the water surface when feeding cobia that have been raised to adulthood in the FAML tanks. The fish are so aggressive that they'll come clear of the water to take an offered shrimp -- if not a finger.

One of the major steps in research is to identify all the factors that can change, and then arrange things so only one of them can be changed. Then, the researcher controls that change. From that, the researcher can learn what factors affect the fish, and how great those effects are.

"The information we learn here is information we don't even have from the wild," Holt said. "Where in the water column do the fish live? Where do they feed? All that is necessary for us to make changes."

Cobia is such a potentially important food fish - in a world where more and more people are eating fish, but fisheries are being reduced - that Holt gets calls from all over the world from people eager to learn the results of FAML's research. Scientists from Brazil are visiting; scientists from Panama are considering it. In China and Japan, mariculture - the growing of fish commercially - is already big business.

"If we can increase the survival rate (of the fingerlings) by 25 percent... " Holt trailed off, wistfully.

Then, there's the problem of southern flounder. Anyone who's dined at a seafood restaurant is probably familiar with southern flounder. Researchers are even more familiar with the fish than that, but not in the same way - and not as familiar as they'd like to be.

"We can get them to spawn, but not reliably," Holt said.

About a decade ago, the bottom dropped out of the flounder population along the Texas coast. That population is now stable, Holt said, but still much lower than it was in the past.

STAFF PHOTOS BY PHIL REYNOLDS

At the same time, southern flounder are coming under increasing fishing pressure, and decisions may be made soon on adding supplementary stocks of the fish much in the same manner that redfish are stocked along the Texas coast.

The problem is that researchers don't know enough about what makes flounder spawn in the first place.

"There some cue, there's something missing," Holt said. "We know the males move offshore (from bay waters) earlier than the females. Is there some chemical cue? A hormone?"

Local fish leave protected bays and estuaries in the fall to spawn in the Gulf of Mexico; in the spring, tiny flounder are carried back in on flood tides to the bays, where they'll spend a couple years growing to adulthood.

What researchers would like to do is get the flounder to spawn earlier, and in the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department hatchery ponds instead of in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, they managed to do just that last year, though on a scale they consider very small indeed. As a result of that, some 1,500 flounder fingerlings were released into Little Bay at Rockport in April.

Careful! STAFF PHOTO BY PHIL REYNOLDS Researcher Jeff Kaiser prudently keeps fingers clear when feeding a horse blanket sized flounder in one of the FAML tanks.

"It just goes to show what can be done," Holt said.

"We work a whole lot in the dark when we spawn fish, because we don't know what we're doing," she said.

That's not what the 54,688 anglers in CCA think. They're the ones who donated the $700,000 to build the new lab building.

In fact, at the Aug. 17 dedication, CCA vice president Pat Murray looked as far into the future as any researcher.

"Think about stocking red snapper," he said. "Think about Gulf grouper ... white marlin."

Murray pointed over his shoulder at the new lab.

"That potential is right here," he said.