The DNA-Team
within Scotland but also to Norway and other coun- tries wanting to develop their aquaculture industries, like North Korea, Russian and Iran.’ In the late ‘90s Land- catch established itself as a proper breeding company. A lab was established at Ormsary that began using genetic technology in a much more sophisticated way than before. In the early 2000s it was moved to Stirling. ‘Initially the breeding
programme was an add-on,’ explains Manchester. ‘There was always confl ict around the needs of the R&D department, which were incredibly capital-intensive. So for ten years it was a real challenge to balance the needs of all the stake- holders in the company. However, this long-term investment in R&D is now bearing fruit, and since then we have seen the focus of the company shift from a production to genetics. We now sell science, in three packages: eggs, smolts and genetic services. In the early days fi sh farmers were fi shermen who could no longer make a living from the sea. These farmers were more concerned with the end product and processing, with less of a focus on breeding. ‘The industry was hampered in that way for a number of years,’ says Manchester. ‘However, it has now moved towards recognising the importance of breeding; people are seeing that specifi c strains of salmon are providing a more consistent product.’ Applying genetics to salmon is not without its diffi culties. One of the main problems is that it takes four years to take a salmon from egg to breeding fi sh, compared to a year in pigs and even less in poultry. This means that geneticists have to wait four years before a breeding decision
‘With salmon we are only ten generations away from a wild fish’
can be made. Salmon have only been farmed commercially for around forty years, so they are only ten generations away from a completely wild fi sh. ‘If you compare that with other domes- ticated animals that have been bred commercially for thousands of years, then in terms of breeding we are only at the foothills of the mountain,’ says Manchester. In terms of technol-
ogy, however, Landcatch is much closer to the summit. ‘Twenty years ago we oper- ated a fairly basic breeding system,’ explains Alan Tinch, Director of Genetics. ‘We were basically doing mass selection, taking the big- gest male and the biggest female. This was effective for producing the biggest fi sh, but you had no control over inbreeding, and you were only focusing on one particular trait. ‘Then we saw the advent of quantitative, or con- ventional, genetics, and that’s been really effec- tive,’ he adds, ‘we’ve seen improvements in a number of traits, mostly in the area of disease resistance, performance and quality characteristics. ‘We have also searched
for DNA markers for fa- vourable variants of major genes affecting commercial traits, and that allows you to accurately breed for that particular trait.’ Within the breeding
www.fishfarmer-magazine.com
programme, each of the individual candidate fi sh is fi n-clipped and can be recognised with its own ID number. Data is collected across the whole lifecy- cle of the fi sh. Landcatch therefore has the records of each individual fi sh, its mother and father, brothers and sisters. ‘So if we went to a Landcatch fi sh on a farm or processing plant anywhere in our customer base,’ explains Tinch, ‘and we take a sample of that fi sh, we can link it back to a male and female on our breeding farm, through the DNA. ‘The fi sh we want to
breed from will have several weights taken, so
31
Clockwise from top left: One of the impressive salmon from the Landcatch broodstock at Ormsary, which comprises 200 families; Head of Broodstock Production, Keith Drynan, scanning broodstock as part of the pedigree breeding programme; each fish has its own unique ID number, from which the team at Ormsary can select for breeding based on the decisions of the geneticists.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68