Land-based & Recirculation – Gigha Halibut
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Top: Halibut. Above: hand feeding the fish on Gigha
ter at 2,000 litres a second into fl umes, which circle around the tanks and feed water into them. The water is fi ltered through centre screens at the bottom of the tanks and then fed into a central channel, which takes the water back out to sea. The water temperature is around 14 degrees ambient. ‘At this stage the fi sh are in good health and feeding well, so they’re pretty easy to keep, just as long as you keep the oxygen levels
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up’, says Wilkieson. ‘They are very hardy fi sh, so apart from a bit of disinfectant in the water we don’t treat, or vaccinate the fi sh. And, once out of the larval stage they don’t really get too stressed.’ Each tank on Gigha contains
around 6,000 fi sh, around 25 tonnes. Fish are always harvest- ed on a Sunday, and packed on a Monday. During harvesting the water level in the tanks is dropped to about a metre, and
Marine
hatcheries always have good years and bad years
400 fi sh at a time are chosen, put down a shute to an ice lorry in sealed harvest bins and shipped to Kames for harvesting. ‘All of our fi sh are female, which makes a big difference because females are generally twice the size of males’, explains Barge. ‘The process is a standard manipulation to create neo males which, when crossed, produce only females.’ Fresh Gigha halibut is sold to top
restaurants through fi sh merchants. The quality of the product has en- sured that there is always a pool of top chefs putting it on their menus. ‘We only have the capacity to grow 100,000 fi sh to harvest weight, but we could easily sell fi ve times that amount’, says Barge. ‘So we can either sell our excess juveniles abroad, or increase production, which is a decision we’ll make at some point in the future. ‘It’s been a long road to get
where we are now’, admits Barge. ‘Whilst we are producing less fi sh now than we did in 1998, we have ridden the R&D storm and it seems that our perseverance is fi nally paying off. The numbers of farmed halibut is not increasing, and wild fi sh quotas are decreas- ing every year, which keeps the prices high. Marine hatcheries always have good years and bad years, so hopefully we’re set for a few good years.’ FF
www.fishfarmer-magazine.com
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