Partnership Profiles: A Queen Conch Hatchery and the Local Fish Initiative

Partnership Profiles: A Queen Conch Hatchery and the Local Fish Initiative

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0:00:01.8 John Sheehan: Partnerships are essential to the success of NOAA Fisheries work and mission, and one of the agency's most effective tools for channeling funds to partners is the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Competition or S-K Grants. It's a program that annually funds about 40 projects that lead to the promotion, development and marketing of US fisheries. This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries, I'm John Sheehan. And today we're going to spotlight two of those projects and hear a little about the ground level work or sea level work happening around the country.

0:00:35.7 JS: S-K Grant recipients work in a variety of fields, the only requirement being that their projects directly benefit US fisheries and fishing communities, be it through something like science and technology, R&D, or even marketing or promotion of US seafood. There are a lot of forms it can take, the but first we'll hear about today is a hatchery and nursery for queen conch in Naguabo, Puerto Rico. The first in fact to partner with a local fisheries association. The fisheries help protect and restore the species and supplement their income in the process. The queen conch's shell is immediately recognizable by its large whirling shape and spines and pinkish coloring inside, and indeed it is iconic in the Caribbean.

0:01:19.8 Megan Davis: It is the most important mollusk in the Caribbean.

0:01:23.7 JS: This is my guest, Dr. Megan Davis.

0:01:26.0 MD: But really from a deep cultural aspect, it goes back many generations to being a subsistence food for us. A shell that can be an ornament or can be used to build houses or lining fences and being an emblem on many flags. It's just a part of the culture.

0:01:46.4 JS: Dr. Davis is a Research Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Harbor Branch, Oceanographic Institute, one of the founders of The Naguabo Aquaculture Center, and who works in partnership with Carlos Velazquez, President of the Naguabo Fishing Association, and Raimundo Espinoza, Founder and Executive Director of Conservación ConCiencia. Queen conch are over-fished and were recently the subject of a proposed rule change that would list them as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Dr Megan Davis, thanks so much for coming. Welcome to Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.

0:02:20.9 MD: Thank you so much, John. It's really a pleasure to be here.

0:02:24.2 JS: So upfront, we should acknowledge that we're recording this the day after Hurricane Fiona has kind of gone through the Caribbean. Could you tell us how the lab is in Puerto Rico and is everything okay?

0:02:38.7 MD: Yeah, thanks for asking. We've been following the storm, this tropical storm that turned into a hurricane over the last couple of days. I've been in and out of touch with the team down there, and everybody's safe, so that's really great, but there's been a lot of flooding. The whole island is out of power. So the lab did survive, and so we're very grateful for that, and we're on back-up power right now to keep the conch alive and keep water flowing.

0:03:06.6 JS: That is at least a small bit of good news. And we'll talk a little bit later about how hurricanes, unfortunately, are one of the big challenges for this project and for the region. But first, let's back up a second and talk about queen conch. How did we get to this point? How did queen conch come to be over-fished?

0:03:27.3 MD: Well, it is a species that's relatively easy to catch, being a slow-moving mollusk that's found in shallow waters, but also into deeper waters. It can be found... Gosh, I think people have found it as deep as 200 or 300 feet, but that's not typically the fishing range. The fishing range would be more in the shallows to maybe 10, 20 feet all the way down to, let's say, 100 feet depending on if scuba gear is allowable for fishing. So because of that, it is easy to be able to collect it. It's also known as a very delicious food, so there has been quite a demand for both on a subsistence level, but also in the tourist trade and the export trade.

0:04:14.7 MD: So it was really in the 1970s when it became easier to ship because of the cargo ships and then the refrigeration and the freezers, and so it became easier for trade of the species, and that really heightened the amount of seafood in general, but certainly we're talking about conch here. And so really, over the last 4-5 decades, we've seen quite a dramatic decrease in the species. So, I would say it's definitely from over-fishing, but it's also from habitat changes. And so there have been habitat changes from hurricanes as we we're talking about, also from other coastal urban development that's occurred along the coastal areas.

0:05:00.3 JS: So let's talk about the project. What is the hatchery and nursery?

0:05:04.4 MD: So we have a hatchery and a nursery in Puerto Rico in a place called Naguabo. It's actually on the Malecon of Naguabo, so down by the seashore on a beach called Húcares Beach, and our project is located inside a fishing association. So I can tell you more about that, but let me explain what a hatchery is. So a hatchery is a place where you bring eggs from the queen conch and you hatch them, you raise them through their larval stage, you feed the larvae phytoplankton, which is microscopic algae, and then they metamorphose into these tiny crawling benthic snails, and then they go into the nursery, which is where they're raised up till about 12 months old, and then at that point, they can be restored into the habitats, into the wild.

0:06:03.2 JS: And you mentioned that the hatchery is run along with a fishers' association. Could you describe that?

0:06:10.4 MD: Sure. So this hatchery and nursery, which we actually call the Naguabo Aquaculture Center, would not be possible at all without the partnerships that we have. My Co-PI on the project who's Raimundo Espinoza, he is the Executive Director of Conservación ConCiencia, and that's a Puerto Rico based conservation organization. And Raimundo and I met at a Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee meeting, which is for NOAA Fisheries. We met and we started talking about this idea of growing conch in Puerto Rico. And so we came together down by the seashore and we talked about this idea of working with the fishers at the fishing association, 'cause there's 22 fishers at the fishing association, and conch harvesting is one of the prime seafood items that they fish there.

0:07:11.9 MD: So we wanted to make sure that this was not a competition or a competitive situation, but that we would be working together. And it wasn't a situation where the conch would compete with the harvested conch, instead it would be a complimentary project. And so that was really important to establish this trust in the beginning.

0:07:34.5 JS: And it's such a nice model because you were working with the local fishing community, you were giving them both the chance to restore the fishery as well as jobs in the actual raising and cultivating of the conch. It seems like everyone's winning.

0:07:50.9 MD: Yes, it really is a perfect situation, and we do work very closely with the fishers. They are the ones that know where to go to bring in the eggs that we use for hatching, and we don't bring the whole egg in 'cause every egg mass that a female lays is a half a million eggs. So we bring in a very small part, like maybe one eighth to a quarter of an egg mass and we leave the rest in the ocean. So in the ocean, less than 1% survive to adults. So in the hatchery, we can improve that survival quite a bit. So the fishers do get paid to bring in the conch eggs. They also help us with the operations. They help us with the installation, and we do pay for their services because this is really important that they're doing this amazing work and we want to make sure that we diversify their livelihoods through aquaculture.

0:08:46.6 JS: And since it sounds like you've been having some real success with this, are there plans to sort of grow the operation or set up other hatcheries?

0:08:55.2 MD: So we are in the process of making our hatchery larger. We have more larval tanks that we're putting in place. We are also expanding to do some aquaponics with the waste water from the conch to be able to grow what we call sea vegetables. And so we're looking at expanding into other areas. We have other funding sources such as USDA, ARS and also Puerto Rico Sea Grant. So we are expanding the model as well. One of our most current S-K NOAA projects, The Saltonstall-Kennedy NOAA Fisheries grants that we received was to be able to build mobile units, mobile labs. And so we're going to make some nurseries in these mobile labs and put them at other fishing associations in Puerto Rico.

0:09:47.7 MD: So we are already thinking ahead for expanding the model. In terms of other places that it's expanding, we have other places in the Caribbean such as Curaçao and also The Bahamas, and more recently Jamaica, and they are also growing queen conch. And so the Puerto Rico hatchery ends up being a place where people can come and learn and train and be able to pick up skills on how to grow the queen conch.

0:10:18.6 JS: Let's talk a little bit about your background. How did you get into the queen conch biz?

0:10:22.8 MD: [chuckle] Well, I met the queen conch when I was a teenager sailing to The Bahamas with my family. And it was one summer when I was about 15 or 16 that the fishermen there showed me a queen conch, showed me and the family the queen conch. And I thought, "Oh my gosh, this is an amazing animal." The shell are built, look at the importance to the seagrass beds, and I also understood then that it was a fishery species and I started thinking, "Gosh, an animal that does taste this good, that's easy to fish, it's likely to need to be replenished." And so I at that moment then I knew that I was going to be a conch farmer.

0:11:06.0 JS: That's a very specific direction.

0:11:09.7 MD: [chuckle] Yes, it is.

0:11:12.0 JS: You touched on this a little bit just now, mentioning how important conch are for the seagrasses as well. Can you talk a little bit more about sort of their role in the, not just the food chain, but in sort of their habitat?

0:11:25.7 MD: Sure. So they are a herbivore, completely a vegetarian. They're actually a vegan. They just eat plant material, and I call them a keystone herbivore because they're so important in the seagrass beds. They graze all the epiphytes. So they don't actually eat the seagrass itself, but they eat all of the little diatoms and all the little epiphytes that are attached to the seagrass blades. So as they clean off the seagrass blades, it gives the seagrass blades the opportunity to have more exposure for photosynthesis, which in turn helps them to grow and flourish. And we all know that seagrass beds are such an important carbon sink. So in many ways, the conch is like the biological engineer that's going around and cleaning up, like a little vacuum cleaner, a little hoover, and helping maintain these important seagrass beds.

0:12:26.1 JS: And let's talk about some of the challenges, besides over-fishing that we've mentioned, specifically hurricanes. Hurricane Maria was devastating to Puerto Rico for a lot of reasons, but also took out a lot of the conch population, right?

0:12:42.2 MD: Yes, it really did have quite an effect on the shallow water conch populations, and still to this day, there's very few that have come back into that area. These hurricanes do a couple of things. They bury the conch because of the sediment shift, but they're also burying the seagrass beds, which is their natural habitat. So there can be quite a decrease then in the shallow water populations. The deeper water populations fortunately are like a refuge, and so they do help to maintain the population and over time, the hope is, and we do see some juveniles that are starting to come back into the shallow area, and so you hope over time that they can be replenished, not only through natural recruitment, but also through the restoration from the hatchery.

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0:13:35.3 JS: Dr. Megan Davis, thanks so much for talking with me.

0:13:38.3 MD: Thank you so much, John, for this opportunity to share the work that we're doing and really appreciate this time.

0:13:44.5 JS: Dr. Megan Davis is a Research Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Harbor Branch, Oceanographic Institute, and one of the founders of The Naguabo Aquaculture Center. You can learn more about the hatchery at conchacquaculture.org. The Naguabo Aquaculture Center is helping their community by working to restore their conch fishery in the Carribean. Our second profile is of one of our S-K Grant partner's that's helping their local fishing community on the business side of the seafood equation. The project is called The LFI, The Local Fish Initiative, local in this case, meaning San Diego. The goal of the project is to create a model for small boat commercial fishermen to get their catch onto local plates and to do it sustainably, both for the health of the fisheries and for the livelihoods of the fishermen.

0:14:36.0 Tanner Saraspe: I love the idea of lowering our carbon footprint, of shortening our supply chain, so not shipping overseas, not shipping out of state even, keeping it local.

0:14:45.1 JS: This is Tanner Saraspe, co-founder of The Local Fish Initiative. Now, models like the LFI do exist. One of them is the seafood equivalent of a CSA or Community Supported Agriculture, and it's called, unsurprisingly, a CSF, Community Supported Fishery. In fact, in its description, the goal of the LFI is described as an industry-informed hybrid restaurant-supported and community-supported fishery model, but we'll hear a little later why neither of those systems worked exactly right for the project's founders.

0:15:19.4 TS: The purpose of this project is essentially to figure out a way to create a platform with a lot of community involvement and collaboration with the local fishing industry here in San Diego, to create a suite of practical services for fishermen that provides real-time demand tracking software within the platform and other opportunities for fishermen to help facilitate their market linkages, how to get into the industry for new entrants. We're trying to provide as many resources specific to San Diego area fishermen as possible when it comes to permitting, regulation, Health Department requirements, how to get your product direct to consumer, direct to restaurants. We're still in the reconnaissance phase and research and development phase of the project, but the goal would be for this model to support our current and future fisherman here in San Diego for generations to come.

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0:16:10.9 JS: Tanner is a Fishermen herself.

0:16:12.4 TS: My fiance and I, we just bought our first commercial vessel.

0:16:15.8 JS: And the owner and founder of a seafood distribution business called Saraspe Seafoods.

0:16:20.2 TS: I come from a third generation fishing family, grandfather, he's still doing it, still commercially fishing lobster. My dad's doing it, my brother just got out of college and he's helping my dad as a deckhand hoping to take on the permit, I think in the near term. I got uncles, cousins. So it's super deep-rooted. [chuckle]

0:16:38.3 JS: She is putting it mildly, very invested in San Diego and the local fishing community.

0:16:43.7 TS: I worked as a manager at my family's fish processing plant throughout college. My mom started that business from the ground up. I started selling my family's catch to our hometown chefs at 21, and within a year, took off. We had over 100 chefs in San Diego interested in buying our products.

0:17:01.2 JS: She started her business about five years ago and things were going great, and then, alright.

0:17:07.5 TS: Between COVID, between being a startup that kind of bootstrapped it's been a lot. Because when the restaurant shut down, my dad, my uncles, brother, they were all kind of in denial that this pandemic was gonna impact their fisheries. And once the news announcements went out that the restaurants were closing, it was kind of one of those panic situations for me where we don't sell any of our products frozen. As soon as the fish hits the dock or the live spot run hits the dock, you're on a timer. It's like, how quick can you get it out to the consumer or to their the chef? It was tough. During COVID, we posed up at elementary schools and local parks, people would have their orders, it gets really challenging when you get in into a live seafood and everything varies by weight. Seafood must be charged by the pound.

0:17:52.6 JS: This trial and error approach is what led to their S-K Grant proposal to the Local Fish Initiative. At first, they thought it would be more of a CSF.

0:18:00.3 TS: And it came down to this lack of infrastructure in San Diego in specific. I think the California coast in general, we lack a lot of waterfront infrastructure for processing, for offloading, and if you want to sell to the consumer, the consumer is very unlikely to buy that 30-pound yellowtail. They are more likely to buy a flayed product skin off, there's no blood line. They don't wanna deal with that. And fishermen don't have the agency or ability to process their catch, so that's where we came up with the CSF-RSF hybrid.

0:18:34.2 JS: Remember, that's a Community-Supported and Restaurant-Supported Fishery model.

0:18:38.0 TS: We have these incredible relationships with some of these very high-end top restaurants, and they are more than willing to work with us to figure out a better way to get products direct from fishermen. They ask me all the time, "How do I get uni? I don't wanna buy it from the wholesaler. A lot of the time the product's dead, the product's not of quality we want. We know there's fishermen in our backyard catching these. How do we buy them?"

0:19:02.2 JS: All of this to say, Tanner and her team are basically building a new model from scratch.

0:19:07.5 TS: So that's what the goal is with LFI, is how do we create this technology that serves as a toolkit that provides this suite of practical services? So it'll facilitate market linkages, shorten the supply chain and give the distribution agency to the fishermen. So the way we looked at it is somewhat of like a matchmaking service for fishermen.

0:19:27.7 JS: They're gathering input and feedback from fishermen and chefs alike, all in furtherance of the goal to "Protect the state's oceans while supporting a fully transparent and viable fishing community."

0:19:40.0 TS: My quest in the beginning as a fisherman's daughter, it was, I wanna deliver the freshest possible catch, and it kind of expanded into this more like grassroots mission, I guess. I wanted to make my mark, revolutionize the industry. So I would think of this as a solution to not just help our family business, but to help other family businesses and small-scale operations like ourselves.

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0:20:05.6 JS: Tanner Saraspe is the co-founder of the Local Fish Initiative, and the founder and owner of Saraspe Seafoods. You can find more about the project at localfishinitiative.com. You can also learn about other S-K Grant recipients or how to apply for one at our website, fisheries.noaa.gov. I'm John Sheehan, and this has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.

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