Queen conch aquaculture 705
FIG. 2 Fishery value and the aquaculture production to partially offset landings in one region. Nicaragua and Honduras have lucrative queen conch fisheries on the Nicaraguan Rise, with values estimated in USD. Converting cultured animals into a fishery product, clean meat, requires time and a considerable outplanting effort. Based on an estimate of required sexually mature adults to generate the catch in 2019, replacing just 10% of the legally allowed harvest would require approximately 2.8 billion outplanted individuals from aquaculture. The costs to create and maintain the infrastructure to generate this level of culture are unknown, but probably vastly exceed the value of the fishery from both countries.
FIG. 3 Natural yield of the queen conch from protecting wild breeding populations. An area of 1 km2 could support 10,000 adults at the recommended minimum density for reproduction. The minimum observed annual reproductive output of 5,000 females is 15.5 billion eggs (Stoner & Appeldoorn, 2022) which leads to an estimated 155,000 settled conch after accounting for planktonic mortality to achieve life-time replacement. Rates were estimated for a population at full capacity and without the added mortality of harvest, making them conservative.
Aquaculture decreases planktonic mortality yet even with
planktonic mortality estimates accounted for, natural repro- duction outstrips foreseeable aquaculture production levels (Fig. 3). Mortality rates during larval dispersal are unknown for the queen conch and for most other marine species with a bipartite lifecycle and planktonic larval phase (Houde & Bartsch, 2008), but they far exceed those of settled juveniles. Statistical models to estimate larval mortality require extensive field sampling and typically focus on quantifying either predation or growth rates but can use size-structured approaches that combine the two (Hinchliffe et al., 2021). Here, natural mortality is estimated fromhatching to settlement based on the lifetime fecundity calculated by Stoner & Appeldoorn (2022) and the assumption that
mortality rates enable replacement. Our examples (Figs. 1–3) are conservative with regards to natural mortality, harvest estimates and potential industry growth. An added benefit of protecting swathes of mature, reproductively active gastropods is increased population resilience and faster recovery when confronted with climate change or other events that cause mass mortality (Micheli et al., 2012).
Discussion
Queen conch conservation aquaculture, designed to restore natural populations or partially offset harvest, faces substan- tial hurdles that science, non-profit entities and industry
Oryx, 2024, 58(6), 700–709 © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605324001443
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