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

为稳步增长的全球人口提供充足和高质量的食物是21世纪最紧迫的挑战之一。面对全世界海洋渔业的衰退，水产养殖提供了一个有希望的替代方案：工业化生产水产来源的有营养价值的食物。大规模水产养殖是一个相对较新的工业部门。它在加拿大的未来取决于研究，这些研究将引领人们找到经济高效、环境可持续的生产方法。我们的大学和政府科学家团队认为，实现这一目标的关键在于理解和管理水产养殖设施，将其作为嵌入自然、空间扩展的海洋生态系统的食物网。我们将与马格达伦群岛的贻贝养殖业合作，并应用食物网和生态系统生态学的原则进行实验研究。我们将探索如何管理整个食物链中的物质和能量流动，从而增加高质量、可收获的贝类的产量。我们的方法是新颖的，因为它超越了在单个贻贝的规模上研究这些过程，而是试图在生态系统背景下理解贝类生产的过程。我们预计，我们的研究将影响政府政策，并最终转化为加拿大贝类水产养殖的新生产方法，由我们的政府和产业支持组织协调。

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.