Integrating across scales in marine aquaculture: the role of trophic dynamics and nutrient recycling for mussel production

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Providing sufficient and high-quality food for the steadily increasing global human population is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. In the face of world-wide declining ocean fisheries, aquaculture provides a promising alternative: the industrial production of nutritionally valuable food of aquatic origin. Large-scale aquaculture is a comparatively recent industrial sector. Its future in Canada depends on research that leads the way to economically efficient, yet environmentally sustainable methods of production. Our team of university and governmental scientists believes that the key to achieving this goal lies in understanding and managing aquaculture facilities as a food-web that is embedded in the natural, spatially extended marine ecosystem. We will cooperate with the mussel aquaculture industry on the Magdalen Islands and conduct experimental research that applies the principles of food web and ecosystem ecology. We will explore how the flows of matter and energy across the food web can be managed in a way that results in an increased production of high-quality, harvestable shellfish. Our approach is novel in that it goes beyond examining these processes at the scale of the individual mussel but attempts to understand the process of shellfish production in an ecosystem context. We anticipate that our research will affect governmental policy and eventually translate into novel production methods in Canadian shellfish aquaculture, mediated by our governmental and industrial supporting organizations.