With aquaculture, you can raise, tag and release a lot more fish than you could catch and tag. The result with tagging is reliable age, growth and abundance studies. Keynote speakers for the workshop were Dr. Lee Blankenship from the Washington State Department of Fisheries, an expert in responsible approaches to marine stock enhancement, and Dr. Don Kent of Hubbs Research of San Diego, Calif., leader of a successful enhancement program in California. Lotz said experience shows that stock enhancement does work. Questions for Gulf of Mexico stock enhancement remain.
Any time there is human intervention in natural systems, people get nervous and rightly so.
The purpose of this program is to determine what can be done and what should and should not be done. Dr. William Hawkins, GCRL researcher and coordinator for the program, said that the next step in the research effort is to organize objectives of the consortium in light of workshop recommendations and to lay the groundwork for research involving specific species. Hawkins said that some general preliminary work is already underway. The consortium is refining techniques to identify fish populations according to genetic structure and is looking at key parasites and diseases of cultured fishes. He said additional initial tasks will be to establish the experimental plan for culture of specific species and refining technology for tagging hatchery-raised fish.