Control of fouling in the aquaculture of Fucus vesiculosus and Fucus serratus by regular desiccation
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Control of fouling in the aquaculture of Fucus vesiculosus and Fucus serratus by regular desiccation Rafael Meichssner 1,2 & Nadja Stegmann 1 & Anna-Sarah Cosin 1 & Dagobert Sachs 1 & Matthias Bressan 2 & Henriette Marx 1 & Peter Krost 2 & Rüdiger Schulz 1 Received: 26 May 2020 / Revised and accepted: 22 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Fouling is a major problem in seaweed aquaculture and one of the main obstacles during the domestication process for new culture species. During first attempts to cultivate Fucus vesiculosus and Fucus serratus in the Kiel fjord (Western Baltic Sea), fouling by the epizoans Electra pilosa, Mytilus sp., and Amphibalanus improvisus rendered the production of marketable biomass impossible. This study tested (1) if regular desiccation by air exposure is effective in decreasing the abundance and size of foulers and (2) if and how regular desiccation affects the growth performance of the cultivated Fucus thalli. For this purpose, thalli of F. vesiculosus and F. serratus were cultivated freely floating in baskets directly deployed in the fjord and desiccated to defined percentages of the wet weight (ww) by air exposure. The treatments comprised controls and desiccations of different intensities (from 90 to 40% of ww) and at different frequencies (1× week−1, 3× week−1). Growth rates of both Fucus species were not or only slightly reduced by the desiccation treatments. The final harvested biomass of F. vesiculosus under frequent mild desiccations (3× week−1 to 80% of ww) was even higher than the biomass of undesiccated controls. The size of the epizoans E. pilosa and A. improvisus was significantly reduced by the desiccation treatments and the abundance of all epizoan species was drastically reduced by the desiccation regimes. Frequent mild desiccations (F. vesiculosus: 3× week−1 to 80% of ww, F. serratus: 3× week−1 to 90% of ww) proved to be most effective and decreased the epizoan ww share of the total harvest from 13.0 ± 4.8% in the control to 1.8 ± 0.2% for F. vesiculosus and from 19.1 ± 2.7 to 1.0 ± 0.1% for F. serratus. Thus, desiccation seems to be an effective measure for the production of clean Fucus biomass in culture which is necessary for further valorization. A technical solution for the implementation of this procedure in large-scale cultures remains to be developed. Keywords Fucus vesiculosus . Fucus serratus . Phaeophyceae . Aquaculture . Fouling . Epizoans . Desiccation . Air exposure
Introduction Seaweed cultivation has become a large industry in the course of the past decades having reached an annual worldwide harvest of about 30 million t wet weight (ww) in 2016 (FAO 2018a). However, one major impediment limiting quantity as well as quality of seaweed production is the overgrowth of the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10811-020-02274-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Rafael Meichssner [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Physio
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