Irish Minister believes in cod farming

IRELAND: The Irish Minister of Fisheries Sean Connick visited cod breeding project EIRCOD at the NUI Galway Carna Laboratory, aimed at designing, establishing and operating a cod broodstock programme customised for the Irish environment and underpinning the native fish farming industry.

“The benefits from supporting the development of an emerging cod farming industry in Ireland are many,” said Minister Connick, whose Department has already highlighted the need to research and develop alternative aquaculture species on a commercial and profitable scale in its recent Food Harvest 2020 Report. 

“In addition to the obvious socio-economic benefits accrued by coastal communities, such an industry would contribute positively to Ireland’s aquaculture and seafood sectors by offering species diversification and high value added products,” he said.

Leading fish geneticist Professor Tom Cross who, with his team at UCC, are partners in EIRCOD stated: “We are using the latest genomic approach to assist the NUI Galway cod breeding programme and increase knowledge of wild stock structure. This invokes next generation sequencing of part of the cod genome allowing us to detect many thousand microsatellites and SNPs (as used in human forensics) and also functional genes involved with traits important in farmed production.“

The first three years of EIRCOD saw the transfer from NUI Galway’s Martin Ryan Institute (MRI) Carna Lab to the Trosc Teo fish farm in Connemara, Co. Galway of specially bred juvenile cod, reared from eggs collected from the Celtic Sea off the South coast of Ireland.

By 2011 the EIRCOD project will have had adult cod at sea for the past four years with in excess of 50 unique family groups, many of which will be reaching their sexual maturity. It will therefore be possible for researchers to selectively breed these fish for the first time; identifying and actively selecting the best performers and applying classical breeding techniques that have been used for centuries in agriculture to give a better performing stock and applying them to fish farming.