Shrimp and Shrimping Information

An Oral History of Shrimp Farming in the Western Hemisphere

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As Told By

 

Bill More: Bill is a shrimp farming consultant and vice president of the Aquaculture Certification Council.  He got started in shrimp farming in 1962 and spent twenty years in Panama developing one of the most successful shrimp farms in the Western Hemisphere.

 

Jim Heerin: Jim is co-chairman of Sea Farms International, Inc., the management company for one of the largest (16,000 acres of ponds in Honduras) shrimp farming operations in the Western Hemisphere.  He got started in shrimp farming in 1966.

 

David Drennan: David is manager of a shrimp hatchery in the Dominican Republic.  Previously, as a consultant, he worked for many of the most successful shrimp farming operations in Central America.  He owns many “firsts” in shrimp farming.  For example, he was the first person to spawn Penaeus vannamei!  He got started in shrimp farming in 1967.

 

Russ Allen: Russ is a shrimp farming consultant, president of the United States Shrimp Farmers Association, and president of Seafood Systems, which designs and builds aquaculture facilities.  He started farming shrimp in 1976 in Ecuador.  He says in the early days in Ecuador, “War-like conditions existed between Empacadora Nacional and Empacadora Shayne—Hatfield and McCoy stuff—in boats, at night, just a few degrees south of the equator.”

 

Henry Clifford: Henry is technical director at Shrimp Improvement Systems, a supplier of genetically improved broodstock and seedstock.  He got started in shrimp farming in 1979.  Later his consulting company, a partnership with Harvey Persyn, industrialized shrimp farming in Brazil and promoted the idea of domesticating shrimp broodstock in recirculating systems.  His company introduced P. vannamei to Brazil.

 

Larry Drazba: Larry is manager of Camanica, S.A., a 700-hectare, semi-intensive shrimp farm and processing plant in  Nicaragua.  He got started in 1980, farming freshwater prawns (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) in Mexico, and over the last 25 years has experienced many of the harsh ups and downs associated with shrimp farming.

 

 

Background

 

 

Shrimp farming traces its origins to Southeast Asia where for centuries farmers raised incidental crops of wild shrimp in tidal fishponds.

 

Modern shrimp farming was born in the 1930s when Motosaku Fujinaga, a graduate of Tokyo University, succeeded in spawning the kuruma shrimp (Penaeus japonicus).  He cultured larvae through to market size in the laboratory and succeeded in mass producing them on a commercial scale.  For more than 40 years, he generously shared his findings and published papers on his work in 1935, 1941, 1942 and 1967.  Emperor Hirohito honored him with the title “Father of Inland Japonicus Farming”.

 

In 1954, after having achieved the title of Director of the Research Bureau of the Japanese Fisheries Agency, Fujinaga retired and, in 1963, he and some colleagues started a shrimp farm.  They used large, semi-intensive ponds on discarded salt beds and sandy beaches, instead of following Fujinaga’s original idea of super-intensive ponds.  In its May 1965 issue, National Geographic magazine reported: “Despite years of hard work, capped with brilliant technical success, Dr. Fujinaga has yet to make a profit from his operation.  But he...expects to turn the corner within two or three years.”  That was the experience of most shrimp farmers in the 1960s, and many sing the same song today.

 

Fujinaga also deserves the title “Father of Modern Shrimp Farming”.  In 1996, his sons, Ted and Kochi, worked as shrimp farming consultants in Southeast Asia.

 

In the early 1960s, a small shrimp farming industry sprang up around Japan’s Inland Sea and on the southern side of Kyushu Island, near the cities of Amakusa and Kagoshima.  In 1964, J. Kittaka developed a technique for rearing shrimp larvae in large outdoor tanks that simulated the natural enviornment.  In 1973, Mitsui Norin Marine Company, Ltd., pioneered the use of double-bottomed tanks, after a design by Kuni Shigueno.

 

World Shrimp Farming 1992 pegged Japan’s production of farmed shrimp at 3,000 metric tons (live weight), from 150 semi-intensive and intensive farms with 400 hectares of ponds.  In the Kagoshima area of Kyushu, farmers used large, round, land-based tanks and produced 15,000 to 20,000 kilograms per hectare.  Later, semi-intensive farms appeared on Japan’s southern islands—Okinawa, for example.

 

A cool climate, a rugged coast and high costs mitigate against shrimp farming in Japan.  But, since Japanese consumers pay amazingly high prices for fresh “live” kuruma shrimp (P. japonicus), Japanese shrimp farmers will find a way to service that market.  Recently, farmers in northern Australia began growing kuruma shrimp for the live market in Japan.

 

Although Japan never became a major shrimp farming nation, events were taking place in the United States that would thrust it to the forefront of shrimp farming technology.  In 1950, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (later to be named the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) established a lab in Galveston, Texas, to investigate the red tides that were killing large populations of commercially valuable marine life.  These investigations led to the development of techniques for culturing marine phytoplankton.  In 1958, when the lab began investigating larval shrimp rearing, it used marine phytoplankton to feed the larval stages of shrimp—and the famed “Galveston Hatchery Technology” was born.

 

As the pieces of shrimp farming technology dribbled out, consultants, large corporations, feed companies and investors carried them to Latin America, particularly Honduras, Panama, Brazil and Ecuador, where they teamed up with local entrepreneurs to build farms, hatcheries, feed mills and processing plants.  Worldwide, researchers and farmers tested dozens of penaeid species for their farming potential.  In the process, they worked out breeding and spawning techniques for most of the farmed species.  Other research concentrated on growout technology, nutrition and disease.  These early efforts laid the groundwork for an industry that expanded for two decades.

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Bill More

 

At the Fourth Latin American Aquaculture Congress and Exhibition (Panama, October 2000), I interviewed Bill More, at the time vice president of operations at Agromarina de Panama, one of the oldest and most successful shrimp farms in the Western Hemisphere.  Bill got started in shrimp farming in 1962.  He is currently vice president of the Aquaculture Certification Council and a shrimp farming consultant.

 

A continuous flotilla of islands along the Texas coast creates a 500-mile-long inter-coastal waterway that’s interlaced with warm bays and fertile lagoons—the perfect nursery ground for juvenile shrimp.  The breaks between the islands are called “passes”, and it’s through these passes that shrimp larvae, born in the open ocean, enter the nursery ground.

 

Shrimp News: How did you get started in shrimp farming?

 

Bill More: When I graduated from college in 1962, the State of Texas hired me as a marine biologist.  One of my first responsibilities was to identify the shrimp larvae entering Texas bays through the island passes.  The state needed the data to update shrimp fishing regulations.  Not really knowing where to start, I went to Harry Cook (currently a shrimp farming consultant) at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in Galveston, Texas.  At the time, the Fish and Wildlife Service was part of the Department of Interior.  Later it moved to the Department of Commerce and was renamed the National Marine Fisheries Service.

 

One of my jobs, working in conjunction with biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service, was to collect shrimp larvae entering the passes and try to identify them by species.  Since the species were difficult to identify accurately, the decision was made to grow the larvae and describe the various stages.  Females of three penaeid species were spawned in the Galveston Lab, using a technique described by Fielder in the 1950s.  Ray Wheeler, a biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service, raised some of them in a little lagoon next to the Galveston Lab.  By observing the larvae as they passed through various life stages, the shrimp species were identified.  This was all taking place from 1963 to 1965.

 

At the time, our interest was primarily in pink shrimp (Penaeus duorarum), brown shrimp (P. aztecus), and white shrimp (P. setiferus), the major species caught by commercial fishermen in Texas.  We had trouble finding female white shrimp that had mated.  We found females with eggs and females that had spawned, but we could not find females with the male spermatophore attached.  Since the Fish and Wildlife Service only contracted boats to fish between 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., we were probably heading back to port about the time the P. setiferus were mating.  By the time we started fishing the next morning, the females had spawned and the spermatophores were gone.

 

In 1964 or 1965, we shipped some larvae to Jerry Broom who was working for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries on Grand Terre Island, at a pilot mariculture station for oysters and shrimp.  Other than work done in South Carolina in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Bob Lunz, Jerry was the first person to grow commercial quantities of shrimp in the Western Hemisphere (1966-67)!

 

At the time, there were no commercial shrimp feeds, so Jerry used catfish feed.  It was not very efficient, but it was a start.  Later on, when I began growing shrimp in Palacios, Texas (1968-69), we used a dry, extruded cat (not catfish) food that worked much better, but it floated.  We mashed it to make it sink and got better results.  The shrimp grew faster.

 

In 1968, Jerry Broom, David Drennan, and Eric Heald, under contract with United Fruit Company/Armour Company developed a shrimp farm on the Atlantic coast of Honduras, near Tulian.  Initially, they worked with brown shrimp spawned at a marine laboratory set up by Dr. Claire Idyll at the University of Miami around 1967 or 1968.

 

Brown shrimp did not do well in ponds in Honduras.  In 1968 or 1969, David Drennan went to Panama to look for new species.  He brought back some P. occidentalis, a white shrimp that makes up 80% of the commercial catch on the Pacific Coast of Panama.  Occidentalis is easy to spawn and, in the ocean, it grows very fast to a large size.  In ponds, it proved it was not a good candidate for shrimp farming because of slow growth and low survival.  Over the last 20 years, occidentalis has been looked at several times, but it is always the same story: low survivals and poor growth when stocked at commercial densities (more than eight postlarvae per square meter).  If crowded, they stop growing.

 

Jerry Broom had some success growing occidentalis in Honduras—at low densities (less than five postlarvae per square meter).  Nonetheless, in 1969, United Fruit and Armour pulled the plug on the project.

 

Meanwhile back in Texas, in 1967, the State of Texas decided to build a Marine Fisheries Station in Palacios, Texas.  Some ponds were devoted to redfish and oyster culture and others to shrimp culture research.  Ponds stocked with brown and pink shrimp grew very slowly but white shrimp (setiferus), collected from the bay and grown in ponds produced biomass four times larger than anything produced from the pinks and browns, and they grew twice as fast.  In 1968, we produced 800 pounds per acre of 12 to 14-gram animals in 120 days.

 

In 1969, Ralston Purina, already a producer of trout and catfish feeds, visited the Palacios facility because of its interest in marine fish feeds—and noticed the work we were doing with redfish and shrimp.  Shortly after the visit, Purina hired me to head up a research and development team to explore the potential of farming shrimp commercially in the United States.

 

In 1970, Dennis Zensen and I (for Purina) negotiated a contract with Florida Power Corporation in Crystal River, Florida.  A research facility, built in 1970, commenced with the idea of producing pink and brown shrimp for the bait market and then switching to white shrimp for human consumption.

 

In March 1971, Purina hired David Drennan and sent him to Panama to look for other species of shrimp because the only commercial candidate we had at that time was the Gulf white shrimp, P. setiferus.  Yoshi Hirono, hired in 1970 to run the hatchery, had been working for Dr. W. Tack Yang at the University of Miami, where he lived and worked in a little laboratory on a very low budget.  Bill MacGrath, a nutritionist at Ralston Purina, came on board in July 1971 to develop shrimp feeds.  Later the same year, Padge Beasley was hired as growout manager; and Ron Staha, as hatchery manager.  Already on board was Melvin McKey, as construction supervisor.  In 1971, 15 raceway ponds were constructed (some of them a quarter-acre, others a half-acre) and stocked with native species of brown, pink and white shrimp, and imported white shrimp from Panama.  Following completion of the facility, Harvey Persyn (currently a shrimp farming consultant), Durwood Dugger (also a shrimp farming consultant) and Ron Wulff (last report, raising snakes in Arizona) were hired.  Ron had one of the greenest thumbs I had ever seen and was a natural at aquaculture.  In 1972, William (Bill) MacGrath became Director of Research and Development in St. Louis, and I was Manager/Director of the research station in Crystal River.  Bill left the company in about 1977 and had a long and successful career in shrimp farming in Ecuador and Honduras.

 

In 1972, David Drennan shipped a couple of P. vannamei spawns to Crystal River.  The eggs hatched and two tanks were stocked with nauplii.  We produced about 110,000 postlarvae and stocked them in quarter-acre ponds.  Ninety days later, to our amazement, the equivalent of 4,000 pounds per acre of 14-17 gram shrimp were produced, without aeration!  We really got excited, called in all the Ralston Purina honchos from St. Louis, and shared our results.  Since the Crystal River pilot facility was the pet project of Purina’s Chairman Hal Dean, we really got a lot of attention.  After taking a careful look at our results, Purina was ready to go with a commercial shrimp farm.

 

Since vannamei is a non-indigenous species, the State said there was no chance that it could be grown in Florida, so Purina turned to Latin America where it had feed mills and tuna processing plants.  Mexico was eliminated because shrimp farming, at the time, was reserved for cooperatives sponsored by the government.  We ended up in Brazil in 1972, where an agreement was negotiated with the University of Pernambuco in Recife to renovate some old ponds that had been used for snook culture.  The ponds were on a penal colony island, just north of Recife.  Using prison labor, twenty 1/10-acre ponds were constructed (dug by hand).  David Drennan sourced P. schmitti and P. brasiliensis from Venezuela and sent them to Crystal River, where postlarvae were produced and shipped to Brazil.  We worked with eight different species of peneaids: occidentalis, stylirostris, vannamei, brasiliensis, schmitti, aztecus, duorarum, and japonicus.  The Brazilian team that went with me consisted of Yosuke Hirono, Padge Beasley and Melvin McKey.

 

In 1971, when I went into Brazil with Ralston Purina to farm shrimp, there were no shrimp farms in Central America.  Ecuador and Brazil had a few extensive shrimp ponds, but no big semi-intensive farms.

 

In 1972, the Marifarms Group, working with Japanese technology and under the management of John Cheshire, started a shrimp farm in Panama City, Florida.  It built a hatchery, fenced off an entire bay and began farming Penaeus setiferus, an indigenous white shrimp.  Marifarms had a Japanese biologist named Y. Akamena, who trained Chris Howell, who has had a long career in shrimp farming and currently runs a hatchery in Malaysia.  Marifarms was actually ranching shrimp.  It stocked postlarvae in its huge bay and attempted to harvest them several months later.

 

The Japanese had always worked with P. japonicus; they had never worked with white shrimp and, consequently, did not have much luck with them.  They didn’t understand setiferus’s breeding cycle.  They didn’t know that they needed wild females with spermatophores attached.  Harvey Persyn, currently a shrimp farming consultant, and David Drennan, currently a hatchery manager in the Dominica Republic, went up to Panama City to help Marifarms.  They took them out on a boat and showed them how to catch gravid females in Apalachicola Bay.  We helped them off and on during their run at shrimp farming, but then the environmentalists got after them and they abandoned the project because of substained losses.  Shrimp fishermen also protested the fencing off of a bay that had previously been open for fishing.

 

Another significant event occurred in 1973, before we went into Panama with Agromarina de Panama.  Jim Heerin (currently chairman and chief executive officer of Shrimp Culture, Inc., the management company for one of the largest shrimp farms in the world) and Don Sweat were running a turtle processing operation in Florida called Sea Farms.  When turtle fishing was banned, they decided to get into shrimp farming.  They set up a bunch of hatchery tanks in Key West and ran trials with aztecus and duorarum.  These species turned out to be poor candidates for farming.  So we formed a little joint venture with Sea Farms in 1972.  We sourced gravid females in Panama and shipped half off to our facility in Crystal River and half to their hatchery in Key West.  Later, Sea Farms developed successful shrimp farms in Honduras.

 

In 1975 or 1976, Dr. Harold Webber, a consultant, convinced a bunch of American investors to build a big shrimp farm in Costa Rica.  Called Maricultura, it still operates today under a different name and ownership.  Harold’s team of shrimp people included Billy Drummond, Eric Heald and Jerry Broom.

 

By the mid-1970s, there were three big semi-intensive shrimp farms in Central America: Sea Farms, Maricultura and our operation, Agromarina de Panama.  Ecuador also got rolling about the same time, followed by Peru, but there were no shrimp farms in Venezuela or Colombia.  Brazil was still fooling around with japonicus.  When Harvey Persyn left Agromarina de Panama in 1981, he went to Brazil and built the first vannamei/stylirostris farm there.

 

When I arrived in Brazil in 1972, there was already a project in northeast Brazil, owned by a Dutch company, that produced salt, Artemia (brine shrimp)—and shrimp!  They were stocking japonicus in large ponds and once a month, during the highest tide, they would open the gates and capture the shrimp as they migrated out of the pond.  The managers would take what they wanted for their own use and sell the rest locally, probably no more than a few hundred pounds a year under the best of conditions.  The amazing thing is that the japonicus were reproducing in the ponds.

 

While in Brazil, we evaluated eight species, once during the rainy season and once during the dry season.  Vannamei did three times better than any other species.  It grew faster and had higher survivals.  After two years of research and development in Brazil, Purina decided to commercialize the business and requested a permit from the Brazilian government to import a non-indigenous species from the United States (Crystal River).  The government denied the permit.  Nicaragua was considered, but a contract could not be negotiated.  In 1974, we found a home in Panama and negotiated a 4,000-hectare land concession and a twenty-year tax holiday.

 

In 1974, I moved to Panama as general manager and with a team of experts consisting of Yosuke Hirono, Padge Beasley, Ron Staha, Melvin McKey, David Drennan started Agromarina de Panama.  Yosuke was in charge of research and development.  He spent part of his time in the hatchery and part on the farm.  Padge was in charge of the farm, and Ron was in charge of the hatchery in Veracruz.  David Drennan managed our sourcing operations and Melvin McKey was the project engineer.  Harvey Persyn was manager of Crystal River operations and William MacGrath was director of research and development in St. Louis.

 

David would go out every night, capture mated females, spawn them on the boat, hatch the eggs and bring the nauplii back to the hatchery.  From 1974 to 1976, roughly eighty percent of Agromarina”s production was P. stylirostris because it was easier to source mated females of this species.  Although Agromarina grew 800 to 1,200 pounds per acre of 18-20 gram animals, production of P. vannamei was better (2,000 pounds per acre).

 

When it became apparent that we could not sustain a year-round commercial operation using P. stylirostris, and with so few wild P. vannamei available (3% of the population), the decision was made to mature and mate wild P. vannamei at the hatchery!  In 1976, Joe Mountain, who was working for us in Crystal River, came to Panama to work on shrimp maturation, and in 1977, we had a big breakthrough.  We learned to produce all the P. stylirostris we needed by cutting off one of the female’s eyestalks (ablation).  However, ablation did not work as well with P. vannamei because they were not getting the right diet.  Once the nutritional and environmental requirements for maturing P. vannamei were satisfied, ablation worked and commercial quantities of good quality nauplii produced.  In 1978, the commercial production of P. stylirostris was replaced with P. vannamei.

 

In 1981, Purina closed the research and development center in Crystal River, Florida, expanded farm operations in Panama, and began selling technology and consulting in other countries.  I continued to consult with Agromarina while selling technology for Ralston Purina International.  At that time, Purina had about 220 hectares of ponds.  By 1986, they were up to 700 hectares.  That is when Purina decided to sell the farm and many of its other operations in Latin America.  Granada Corporation, of Houston, Texas, purchased Agromarina, and later, David Eller, one of Granada’s principal investors, purchased Agromarina from Granada.  I continued to consult with Agromarina from 1986 to 1988 and returned as vice president of operations in 1989, at the request of the new owners.  When WSSV hit in 1999, Agromarina was operating a 920-hectare farm and a hatchery that produced 40–50 million postlarvae per month.

 

When whitespot hit, in retrospect, a decision should have been made to minimize spending until whitespot was under control.  Instead, the company continued to invest money ($2 million) to develop a super intensive culture system that could produce shrimp in the presence of whitespot and a $500,000 broodstock facility designed to produce a disease tolerant animal.  The broodstock facility was state-of-the-art and produced around 3,000 to 6,000 broodstock a month from the survivors of repeated whitespot challenges.  Unfortunately, when the bank sequestered Agromarina, the farm closed and the broodstock animals were lost.

 

In February 1999, Dr. Paul Frelier came to Panama to help a small farm that thought it had Taura virus.  All its animals were dying.  Paul, who had diagnosed whitespot at Harlingen Shrimp Farms in Texas in 1995, looked at the animals and immediately guessed that they had whitespot.  Paul does not believe PCR tests are reliable for detecting whitespot.  He ran some histological tests on the animals and they were positive for whitespot.

 

In March 1999, Drs. Flegel and Fegan from Thailand were in Panama for, ironically, a conference on how to keep whitespot out of Panama.  Although whitespot was present on all of the farms checked, most shrimp were not dying from it.  Not all the farms would let them into their facilities.  Two or three weeks after the visit, mass mortalities hit 90% of the farms in Panama.  At Agromarina, survivals dropped to 20 to 45%.  With each succeeding crop, the survival rate continued to drop.  During the 2000 dry season (January through April), survivals went back up to 20 to 25% again.  When the rainy season began (May through December), survivals dropped back to 12 to 15%.  Of the nine thousand hectares of shrimp ponds in Panama, five thousand of them are near Agromarina, and they are the farms that were hit the hardest.  Farms that are having the best success are those with small ponds and intensive management.  Over time, survivals have improved.  In July 2001, they were over 40%.

 

Agromarina de Panama, S. A., ceased to operate as a company in January 2001 and the assets were passed to So T Chea (Captain Charlie’s Seafood) of Houston, Texas, at a public auction in April 2001.  William R. More is no longer associated in any way with the company.

 

Information: Bill More, Aquaculture Certification Council, Inc., 12815  72nd Avenue, Northeast, Kirkland, WA 98034 USA (phone 425-825-8634, fax 425-671-0146, email wrmore@comcast.net, webpage http://www.aquaculturecertification.org/index.html).

 

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Jim Heerin

 

On June 30, 2004, I interviewed Jim Heerin, co-chairman of Sea Farms International, Inc., the management company for one of the largest shrimp farming operations in the Western Hemisphere.  I asked Jim about his 37 years in shrimp farming and the history of Sea Farms International, which operates research facilities in the United States and hatcheries, processing plants and shrimp farms in Venezuela and Honduras.  Its primary holdings are in Honduras where it has over 16,000 acres of shrimp ponds.

 

Shrimp News: Tell me a little about your education and how you got started in shrimp farming?

 

Jim Heerin: I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and then the University of Connecticut Law School.  In 1965 after finishing a stint in the Air Force, I joined a law firm in Philadelphia, in the corporate department.  One of my early assignments was to form a company for a client of the firm, Bill Hannum, who had developed an interest in shrimp farming.

 

While vacationing in the Florida Keys, Bill had observed shrimp passing between the islands in the Keys and thought it might be possible to farm them.  His early interest turned into an avocation and he eventually decided to attempt it on a full time basis.  In 1966 he raised about $250,000 from friends and neighbors in the Philadelphia area and came to my law firm to form a company to do research and development in shrimp farming.  The more senior people in our department thought it was a bizarre idea, so as the new kid on the block, I got the job, and on September 21, 1966, Sea Farms, Inc., was incorporated in Delaware.  That was some time ago, so what follows is my best recollection after reviewing what records I still have.

 

The company purchased two small islands in the Florida Keys.  On one, Tarpon Belly Key, we dug two canals about 100 feet wide, 500 feet long and about 20 feet deep and netted off the ends.  If you tried to do that today, you would probably be put in jail, but back then, the rules were more permissive and we were able to get permits for all the work.  In the beginning, we netted juvenile pink shrimp, Penaeus duorarum, and stocked them in the canals.

 

While still employed by the law firm, I served as general counsel  and secretary of Sea Farms.  I attended the directors’, shareholders’ and other meetings, took the minutes and gradually developed a good relationship with Bill and the other directors and investors.  Bill retired in Key West in the mid 1970s and eventually returned to Pennsylvania.  We lost touch with each other by the early 1980s, and he has since passed away.  Bill was a true pioneer of the business.

 

In 1968 Sea Farms purchased Thompson Enterprises, a long-established fishing company in Key West.  This gave Sea Farms a land base for operations and provided some financial support for our shrimp farming research.

 

At about the same time, Marifarms, another one of the early shrimp farming operations in the United States, netted off a bay in the Florida Panhandle.  It stocked shrimp in the bay and harvested them with a small trawler.  I’m not sure who got started first, but I think we were in business a couple of months ahead of them, making us one of the first companies in the United States that was formed to farm shrimp.

 

Also during this period Ralston Purina got involved in shrimp farming research.  I believe the initial impetus was its interest in the shrimp feed business.  In 1968/69, Ralston built a shrimp research facility in Crystal River, Florida.  Over the next few years, particularly after I moved to Key West in 1971, I met most of the people involved with Ralston, including Dennis Zensen, who was in charge of the project early on, Bill MacGrath, Yoshi Hirono, Bill More, Padge Beasley, John Bargate and Harvey Persyn.  We all enjoyed and benefited from a free exchange of ideas about shrimp farming.

 

Also in the late 1960s, Armour/United Fruit Company had a shrimp farming joint venture on the north coast of Honduras, where it was raising P. occidentalis under the management of Jerry Broom, who reported some very encouraging results in some small scale tests.  I recall that these tests had considerable impact on the feasibility of shrimp farming as a commercial enterprise.

 

In 1968 Sea Farms hired Don Sweat as its first director of aquaculture, and in 1969 constructed a lab and research facilities in Key West on the land acquired with Thompson Enterprises.  Billy Drummond and Linda Davis joined Don as assistants, and the three of them got the true research project started.  Don was another important early player in the business.  They started sourcing gravid duorarum off Key West.  Through the acquisition of Thompson Enterprises, we acquired a fleet of shrimp boats.  On one of the boats, we installed aerated holding tanks and taught the captain how to catch and identify gravid females.  The gravids were brought into the lab, spawned, and the larvae were raised in large, rectangular concrete tanks.  The postlarvae or juveniles were subsequently harvested and stocked in the canals in the Keys.

 

We weren’t the only ones with a shrimp hatchery at that time.  Marifarms had one, Ralston had one and so did the University of Miami, under the direction of Tom Costello.  I think Tom was one of the first academicians involved in shrimp farming.

 

We got pretty good at growing pink shrimp postlarvae, most likely because we had great water.  We had a well that had hydrogen sulfide in it.  When we bubbled it off, the resulting water was virtually sterile.  There’s nothing like good water quality at a hatchery, as we learned later.  We had good luck spawning the shrimp and raising the larvae, but we weren’t getting good results in the growout canals.  The shrimp were probably getting out through the nets at the ends of the canals, or fish that we could not keep out of the canals were eating them.  We had little tangible to show for all the money we spent, but we were learning a lot about shrimp farming.

 

In 1968, when Sea Farms bought Thompson Enterprises, we brought in additional shareholders, some from the Philadelphia area, and some investment companies also became shareholders.  Those were the days when venture capital was popular and companies were looking for exciting new investments, such as aquaculture.

 

By 1969 we had a working hatchery in Key West and the canals on the island, but we weren’t showing much progress with growout in the canals.  So in 1970 we bought a piece of property on Summerland Key, where we built eleven one-eighth acre ponds and began stocking the ponds as well as the canals.  Survivals improved dramatically in the ponds, though growth was slower than we had hoped.  We learned a great deal about stocking, feeding and husbandry, but being belowground ponds in the coral of the Florida Keys, they were very difficult to harvest.  As fast as we pumped the water out, it would seep back in.  We were learning as we went.  Duorarum proved to be a very hardy animal, easy to spawn and easy to raise in the hatchery.  We thought we were home free, but as it turned out, duorarum was not a good animal in growout.  It never produced good yields in ponds.

 

During this time, we were working with Ralston Purina on feed studies, and from them we heard about work being done with white shrimp species native to the Pacific coast of Central America.  In 1971 we entered into a joint venture hatchery project with Ralston Purina in the Republic of Panama.  We rented National Geographic Magazine’s marine lab in Panama.  The idea was to source gravid shrimp, spawn them at the hatchery and ship the larvae to our stateside hatcheries.  Dave Drennan was in charge of the operation.  We operated the joint venture with Ralston for about two years.  We actually obtained a joint patent with Ralston for the long distance shipment of shrimp larvae.

 

In 1971 I left the law firm and joined Sea Farms full-time as executive vice president.  Sea Farms made the offer in the winter of 1970.  You know what the winters are like in the Northeast.  It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.  So in June 1971, my wife, Sue, and I packed up our two young sons and moved to Key West.

 

By 1972 we had pretty much decided that we could raise shrimp in captivity, but we didn’t think it could be done commercially in the United States because temperatures restricted year round growth, suitable land was too expensive, and environmental restrictions were already becoming a factor.  The board of directors and investors agreed, and we began to look for sites outside the United States.  For shrimp farming to be profitable, we felt it would need to be conducted within twenty degrees of the equator.  With Don Sweat in charge, we began to look at sites in Latin America.  Don and others traveled all over Central America and northern South America searching for the right site.  After a long process of elimination, we narrowed it down to two sites, one in Nicaragua and one in Honduras, both on the Pacific side. We eliminated Nicaragua largely because of what we viewed as the overly acquisitive tentacles of the Somoza government, which we thought would be in power forever.  A good example of making the right decision for the wrong reason.

 

In April 1973, we formed Sea Farms De Honduras (SFH) and signed a long-term lease with private landowners in Honduras for approximately 1,200 acres.  About 130 acres of this land had been used as salt evaporation ponds, which we easily converted into our first shrimp ponds.  We hired Jerry Broom and Billy Drummond as our first on-site managers in Honduras and started construction of a hatchery.

 

When we first set up operations, toward the end of 1973, we wanted to do a little show and tell for the local community members, many of whom I’m sure thought we were CIA agents running some sort of secret lab.  Since the hatchery was not yet operational, we netted shrimp (probably stylirostris) out of the estuary, stocked a few of the ponds and grew them out.  They did marvelously.  We harvested the ponds and had an impressive shrimp feast with the local dignitaries.  After that, we did not use wild stock for about seven years.  It was not scientific enough.  For those seven years, we struggled with the hatchery.  We had water quality problems, diseases—fungi, bacteria, viruses, who knows what—and we didn’t know how to deal effectively with them at the time.  In 1974 we hired Jim Norris as hatchery manager and he spent almost a decade fighting his way up the learning curve and in the process becoming, in my opinion at least, the finest hatchery manager in this hemisphere.  Jim is still with Sea Farms International as head of our genetics research and development operation in Florida.

 

In 1974 Billy Drummond and Jerry Broom left Sea Farms and went to work for the Maricultura project in Costa Rica.  We hired Chuck Hamlin as general manager and Bill Rudd as construction and services manager, as their replacements, and they, along with Jim Norris, formed the management team that really got SFH established firmly in Honduras.

 

At about the same time, Ralston Purina started its Agromarina farm in Aquadulce, Panama.  Bill More was general manager and Yoshi Hirono was technical director.  We worked closely with Ralston, especially Bill MacGrath who was in charge of Ralston’s aquaculture projects at that time.

 

In 1973 I was named president of Sea Farms.  Within a year, the conventional fishing business that Sea Farms operated in Key West and elsewhere was affected adversely by the oil embargo, resulting recession and overexpansion in South America and Key West, and by other factors (not including, I like to think, my stewardship).

 

Accordingly, in 1975, we transferred the shrimp farming assets, including SFH, into a new company, Shrimp Culture, Inc. (SCI).  I became president of SCI as well as continuing with Sea Farms, Inc., where my only task was to sell the conventional fishing assets, which we were able to do in 1976 to Singleton Shrimp Company.  Since then I’ve concentrated on shrimp farming.

 

From 1973 to nearly the end of the decade, we struggled with water quality problems at the SFH hatchery in Honduras.  Located away from the coast, up an estuary, it was, in hindsight, simply not a good location for a shrimp hatchery.  By developing a water filtration and improvement system nearly large enough to serve the city of Los Angeles, we were able to attain good enough water quality to continue our efforts.  We weren’t doing any maturation at this time.  Using two trawlers, we sourced gravid females from the Gulf of Fonseca, brought the females into the hatchery, spawned them, grew the spawns through to postlarvae and stocked the postlarvae in the ponds.

 

In 1976 Padge Beasley joined us as pond manager, and we began to see gradual improvement in growout.  Within a couple of years, after almost ten years of research and development, we were beginning to produce significant amounts of shrimp—not commercial quantities, but we had a system that worked.

 

During the 1970s we brought all our technical people in from the United States.  We considered what we were doing as technology; shrimp farming was “black box” at the time.  We didn’t think the future was in a concept where you harvested juvenile shrimp from the estuary or coastline and stocked them in ponds.  The hatchery end of the business we believed to be one of our big selling points.  We were trying to demonstrate the scientific way of doing shrimp farming.

 

As a result, by 1979 we had eleven, non-Honduran families living at the site in Honduras.  We had a little community, a primary school with an American schoolteacher, volleyball court, and all the neighborhood “issues” you would have in a small subdivision.  Jim Norris, Chuck Hamlin, Bill Rudd, Padge Beasley, Ralph Parkman, Bill McGrath, Ben Ribelen—all had families with them during their tours, so we had to have facilities for them.  We were located on the Pacific coast of Honduras at a remote site on the Gulf of Fonseca, a 45-minute drive from Choluteca, three hours south of Tegucigalpa, the capital, which itself is rather remote.

 

In 1979 Chuck Hamlin transferred to Nicaragua to look for new sites, and I hired Bill MacGrath from Ralston Purina to take his place.  The same year, Ralph Parkman, now CEO at Sea Farms International, was hired as Padge Beasley’s assistant pond manager.

 

Ralph began his aquaculture career in 1972-75 in the Peace Corp in El Salvador, working to implement talapia production on family farms.  After that, he completed his graduate work at Auburn University in 1977, and then spent two years with ConAgra’s catfish operations.  ConAgra was an investor in SCI then, and we were fortunate to learn about Ralph and persuade him that the south coast of Honduras was at least as attractive as the Mississippi delta.  It may have helped that Ralph had met his wife Norma while in El Salvador and this was a whole lot closer to home for her.  Ralph was in Honduras for over nine years and has made a tremendous contribution to SFI over the years.

 

In 1979 Ben Ribelin was hired to head up a maturation program at SFH.  By 1982 we were relying entirely on wild stock for our ponds, so we closed the hatchery at SFH and Ben moved back to the Keys where he continued to develop our maturation system at the Summerland Key hatchery we had refurbished for that purpose.  This continued until 1985, when we closed the Summerland hatchery for a period of time.

 

In mid-1980 we shifted our strategy.  We needed to generate some cash.  We didn’t shut the door on the hatchery, but we did go back to stocking wild seed so we could get commercial sacle production from the farm.  That decision, based primarily on the encouragement of Bill MacGrath, turned out to be very wise.  It allowed us to reduce the research staff and lower expenses.  In 1980 we shifted from an R&D company to a commercial business with about 1,000 acres in production, most of it built between 1978 and 1980.

 

In 1981 we opened an administrative office in Miami, and Bill MacGrath left Honduras and moved to Florida to run it.

 

After we closed the SFH hatchery in 1982, we showed steady growth using all wild seedstock (stylirostris) through 1985.

 

In 1983 we entered into a joint venture with Santiago Maspons to develop a farm in Ecuador.  SCI had a 49% interest in that project for about four years, and then sold its interest back to Santiago, primarily because we were pursuing different strategies.

 

We were pleased enough with our progress that in 1984 we formed Granjas Marinas San Bernardo, a new Honduran company with local shareholders, negotiated a lease from the Honduran government of about 15,000 acres—and began to build ponds.  SCI was a major shareholder.  By the end of 1984, the new San Bernardo farm had 1,200 acres of ponds.  By 1986 we had about 3,700 acres of ponds and were producing about 3 million pounds of shrimp a year.

 

In 1987 we acquired and renovated an existing facility as our first processing plant, Empacadora San Lorenzo.  By 1990 we had 5,000 acres of ponds and were producing about 5 million pounds of shrimp a year.

 

Those were good years for the growth of our company.  By 1993 we had 9,000 acres of ponds and produced 9 million pounds of shrimp.  In 1988 we had reactivated our hatchery in Summerland Key, Florida, which had been mothballed for several years.  With our pond expansions, we needed a more reliable supply of postlarvae than we were getting from the wild stock.  We still had the original hatchery facilities in Honduras, but with the water quality issues and the state-of-the-art at the time, it was more efficient to operate a hatchery in the Florida Keys and fly the seedstock to Honduras, which we did for a good many years.  In fact, we only stopped doing that a couple of years ago.  Our new hatchery and maturation facilities in Honduras, which are located on the Gulf of Fonseca where the water quality is much better than it was at our original facilities on the estuary, are able to supply all our needs with improved postlarvae, and we no longer source any of our shrimp from the wild.

 

Another important milestone in the early 1990s was formation of Shrimp Culture Technologies (SCT), a joint venture between SCI and Dr. Rolland Laramore to develop and commercialize new technologies.  Subsequently, SCI acquired Rolland’s interest in SCT and he became SCI’s Director of Research and Development.

 

In Honduras, we instituted a labor relations program that was developed in Costa Rica called “Solidarity”.  Basically it is a self-governing, employee association where both management and labor are represented.  It has worked out very well.  The association has grown to the point that it now provides food service and bus transportation for the employees and trash collection and recycling for our facilities—and it gets paid for all of these services.  It operates a cooperative store that we believe is the best stocked and most reasonably priced outlet in the Choluteca area.  The Association pays dividends to its members, provides loans and a medical program and organizes social and cultural events for members and the local community.  Labor relations can sometimes be adversarial in Latin America.  Thanks in large part to the Solidarity program and an effective management team led by Carlos Lara, we have never lost a day to labor strife in Honduras.  It has never been an us-against-them situation.  It’s been a wonderful win-win for the company and our employees.

 

In 1992 we brought in additional local investors and merged the San Bernardo farm, Sea Farms de Honduras and other farms owned by some of the San Bernardo shareholders into one company, Grupo Granjas Marinas (GGM).  Up to this point, we had never had a serious disease problem in the ponds.  Once we stocked the animals from the hatcheries or estuary into the ponds, they grew at about a gram a week with 70% survival.  We harvested them, we processed them and we sold them.  We had arrived in the land of milk and honey.

 

Then in 1994 we began to notice a sharp drop in survivals, from 70%, to 60%, to 50%, all the way down to below 20%.  We were on the slippery slope and headed south.  At the time, Dr. Rolland Laramore was the head of our research operation in Vero Beach, Florida.  I asked him what was going on.  Rolland assured me that whatever was killing the shrimp would not kill all of them because if it did, it would not survive.  He said overall survivals would probably not fall below 5%.  He was trying to reassure me, but this was not much reassurance.

 

The Taura virus had arrived.  We got hit hard and spent the next six years reducing costs and learning to live with and manage around Taura.  Slowly, over the next several years, we began to see some improvement.  By 1998 survivals had risen to 40% and we had reduced our costs significantly.

 

By October 1998, we were getting back to normal and anticipating a big harvest when Hurricane Mitch arrived.

 

In mid-1999 the GGM shareholders formed Sea Farms International, Ltd, in the Cayman Islands, to serve as the holding company for existing and future investments in our shrimp aquaculture business worldwide.

 

Later in 1999 as we were continuing to recover from Taura, along came the whitespot virus, which I am glad to say did not hit us as hard as Taura.  Whitespot seems to be a problem only when water temperatures drop in the winter.

 

In 2000, SFI made its first investment in Venezuela.  We needed to diversify geographically.  We have about 16,000 acres of ponds in Honduras, all in the same general location, making us vulnerable to disasters like Taura and Mitch.  Venezuela to date has not had significant virus problems!  In Venezuela, we have higher survivals, like those we had in Honduras pre-Taura.

 

At our research facilities in Vero Beach, Florida, we have a genetic improvement program.  We have maturation and hatchery facilities in Venezuela and Honduras and no longer fly larvae out of Florida.  We no longer stock wild seedstock, and we don’t use antibiotics during the hatchery or growout phases.  In Honduras, we are testing our specific pathogen free and specific pathogen resistant animals.  We hope to implement a similar program in Venezuela to assure long term viability of the industry and are working with the government on that.

 

Information: Jim Heerin, Sea Farms International, Ltd., 765 Lullwater Road, Atlanta, GA 30307 USA (phone 404-377-2233, fax 404-377-0978, email jheerin@jdstg.com).

 

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David Drennan

 

At the Fourth Latin American Aquaculture Congress and Exhibition (Panama, October 2000), I interviewed David Drennan, a shrimp aquaculture specialist, at the time head-quartered in Panama, currently managing a shrimp hatchery in the Dominican Republic.  Drennan owns many firsts in shrimp farming.  Just to peak your interest, in May 1973, he was the first person to spawn Penaeus vannamei!

 

Shrimp News: How did you get into shrimp farming?

 

David Drennan: In 1967, after graduating from the University of Miami, while I was taking some postgraduate courses, I got involved with the Turkey Point Shrimp Project.  Turkey Point was the nuclear power plant that produced Miami’s electricity.  It wanted to use the warm water from the cooling towers to farm shrimp (P. duorarum).  During one growout trial, a cold front came through and the shrimp burrowed 5–6 inches into the mud bottom.  For the next two months, whenever the weather warmed up, a few more shrimp would pop up from the bottom.

 

One of my classmates, Yoshi Hirono (currently a shrimp farming consultant) was also working at Turkey Point.  It was an interesting project, and I easily became immersed in it.  With the guidance of Drs. Claire Idyll, Durbin Tab and Ed Iverson, we captured wild duorarum, stocked them in ponds and tested them as growout candidates.  During this period, my father, Dr. L. M. Drennan, who worked as medical director for Chiquita Banana, gave me the inside track on a shrimp farming job in Honduras, a joint venture between Chiquita and Armour Co.  Jerry Broom, formerly with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, was hired to manage the project, and I took a job working for Jerry, as a liaison between the project and Chiquita.  Eric Heald, a Ph.D. from the University of Miami, was also on the staff.  Harold Weber, a consultant for Groton Associates and a good friend of Jerry and Eric, more or less brokered the project.

 

I grew up in the tropics, spoke Spanish and had previously lived in Honduras, so it was great fun pulling this project together—and all the while becoming increasingly fascinated by shrimp.

 

The project got rolling in late 1968, in Tulian, on Honduras’s Atlantic coast.  But by 1970 it was up for sale because Chiquita and Armour were taken over by companies that did not want to face the high development costs of a new industry like shrimp farming.  During the two years of operations, we worked mainly with white shrimp (setiferous) from Florida and some brown shrimp (aztecus) that we got from Harvey Persyn (currently chief executive officer of Tropical Mariculture Technology, a shrimp farming consulting company), who at the time was working for Dow Chemical in Texas.

 

Since I had also lived in Panama, I volunteered to go to the Pacific Coast of Panama to source shrimp species that might be right for farming in Honduras.  I made two sourcing (fishing) trips to Panama, one with Eric Heald and one by myself.  I shipped some gravid occidentalis to the Turkey Point Hatchery, which spawned them and shipped the postlarvae to Honduras.  Not many shrimp survived, but those that did grew incredibly fast.  We stocked them in February 1969.  Some reached 27 grams in less than 50 days.  By summer, they reached 100 grams.  They spawned naturally in the ponds, and I hatched the eggs in a small makeshift lab.  As the nauplii molted through their five stages, I made drawings.

 

I knew that Yoshi Hirono had just gone to work for Ralston Purina in Crystal River, Florida, and that Purina might be interested in purchasing the Chiquita/Armour project.  Yoshi came down to Honduras with Ralston Purina’s Dennis Zensen to appraise the farm.  Purina decided not to buy the project, but after seeing my drawings of occidentalis larvae and listening to me talk about the potential of shrimp farming, they offered me a job.  I had “hands on experience”, which Purina valued.  I accepted the job in 1971, sealing my fate in shrimp farming for the next thirty years.

 

Bill More, project director at Purina’s Crystal River, Florida, shrimp research facility, asked me if I wanted to work in Crystal River.  I told him that I thought Panama would be a better spot for me because I knew the area—and I knew how to set up a sourcing program for female shrimp there.  The growth of the occidentalis in Honduras had really bedazzled me!

 

For two and a half years I was Purina’s man in Panama.  At the time nobody knew much about penaeid shrimp on the Pacific Coast of Central and South America.  I sourced shrimp there from February 1972 to late 1973.  Early on, I could not determine if the females (occidentalis) had mated or not.  Then one day, I detected a small blob of crystal-colored gel next to a female’s thelycum (genitalia).  Hmmmm….  It turned out to be the remnants of a spermatophore.  Now, finally, I knew what to look for, females with attached spermatophores, or parts of spermatophores.  They had mated.  They were the ones that produced fertile eggs.

 

My first work was with occidentalis, which accounts for around 85% of the commercial catch of white shrimp off the Pacific Coast of Panama.  Stylirostris accounts for 12%–15% and vannamei for 1–3%.  One of the top guys at Purina called me “the shrimp hunter”.  He was right, I loved hunting gravid female shrimp on the open seas at night.

 

I kept them from spawning by lowering the water temperature in their tanks to about 18ºC.  Then, I would pack them up and put them on an early morning flight that arrived at the Crystal River, Florida, hatchery at 4 p.m.  I was putting in 16-hour days, but it was easy work for me—I was driven.

 

Most of the females aborted during the flight to Miami.  I needed to develop a better system.  I tried shipping the eggs, but that didn’t work.  Finally, after a lot of trial and error, I discovered that shipping nauplii (the first larval stage after hatching from the egg) worked best.  I put the nauplii (stage-3) in oxygenated, double plastic bags and then packed the bags in styrofoam boxes for shipment.  I set up a little spawning area at the Smithsonian’s Research Station on the Naos Island, where I hatched the eggs and collected the nauplii.  That was at the beginning of 1973.  I was Purina’s one man show in Panama, politician, businessman, biologist—and hunter.  By this time, the beginning of 1973, shrimp farming was in my blood, a lifetime infirmity, I fear.

 

The Smithsonian’s Dr. Ira Rubinoff graciously provided me with a fiberglass-over-cardboard building to serve as a temporary lab.

 

One night, I was shrimping in a new area and caught a female Penaeus vannamei—with a spermatophore attached!  I had captured males and females of this species before, but this was my first mated female.  Knowing that she was different, I kept her in a separate tank, spawned her, hatched the eggs and sent the nauplii to Purina’s hatchery in Crystal River, Florida.  These nauplii were different from other penaeids; they had a small red dot right in the center of the embryo.

 

Of the 250,000 naups that survived the trip, Bill More and Harvey Persyn stocked 75,000 postlarvae in a half-acre pond and sent 75,000 to Jack Parker at the Texas Mariculture Station in Palacios, Texas.  He stocked them in a half-acre pond, too.  Early on, in Florida, the growth was great, about a gram a week, but no one paid much attention to them.

 

In Texas, Jack was doing a little demonstration harvest for a bunch of Fish and Wildlife officials, and to everyone’s amazement, he pulled 2,000 pounds of shrimp out of the half-acre pond.  And lo and behold—the same thing happened in Florida, a harvest of over 2,000 pounds from a half-acre pond, on the first try.  We were off to the “shrimp races”.

 

I had to source more vannamei.  Vannamei makes up such a small percentage of the penaeids off Panama that I didn’t recognize them the first time I saw their distinctive white legs (patiblancos).  I had to go to the Smithsonian’s library in Panama to identify them.  Eventually we discovered the best places, seasons and hours to fish them.  Sometimes they were as scarce as hen’s teeth.

 

In early 1973, I started looking for farm sites in Panama.  I found a large salt flat on the Gulf of Parita that I thought would be a good location for a shrimp farm because there were no mangroves or trees on it, and the area was not being used for anything else.  The clearing cost would be negligible.  So I flew over the site, took some pictures and sent them up to Crystal River, where they mulled over things for awhile and then came down to have a look.  Everyone agreed that it was a great site for a shrimp farm.  In 1974 we started Agromarina de Panama, S.A., with a 12-acre pilot farm in Aguadulce.  Everyone also agreed that we needed a hatchery, so, also in 1974, we started a hatchery in Veracruz.  My job was sourcing females and helping with the hatchery.

 

Bill More was general manager; Ron Staha, hatchery manager; and Padge Beasley, farm manager.  Initially, we farmed stylirostris, with good results the first year, but the next year, 1975, we got hit with IHHNV, a viral disease that causes very high mortalities in stylirostris.  It killed 89% of the juveniles in the nursery ponds.  Vannamei were more resistant, but did show numerous deformities from the virus.  Since vannamei became our prime candidate for culture, we knew we would have to start breeding them.  Soooo…we put some adult vannamei in maturation tanks and observed their behavior.  The males would pursue the females, but matings seldomly occurred because most of the females were very slow mature.

 

About this time, Joe Mountain (Pepe) was hired, and it was Joe who came up with the idea of pinching off one eyestalk (glands in the eyes produce a hormone that inhibits egg production in penaeid shrimp).  This caused the females to mature when we fed them marine worms (polychaetes, bloodworms, natural foods for wild shrimp).  We fed worms, squid and Purina’s dry MR-25 diet to the shrimp and lo and behold, the females started to develop eggs.  Better yet, we started to get matings, but not all the time.  At one point to get their juices flowing, I collected spermatophores from wild-caught occidentalis and stylirostris, mashed them all together, and threw them into the vannamei maturation tanks.  Sometimes this excited the males so much that they would miss the female’s thelycum and attach their spermatophores to their legs, heads and bodies—and even to each other.

 

We brought penaeid maturation under control in 1976, primarily out of necessity, because vannamei were so difficult to find in the wild.  Agromarina de Panama, which changed hands and names in 2001, nurtured some great shrimp farmers.  Here I would like to recognize some of my fellow workers: Bill More, Peter Van Wyk, Glen Bieber, Joe Mountain, Harvey and Amber Persyn, Yoshi Hirono, Frank Follet, Padge Beasley, Ron Staha, Billy Durmond, Rolland Laramore, Durwood Dugger, Ron Wulff, Bill McGrath, Reggie Markam, Randy Aungst, Franklin Kaiwben, Freddy Cherigo, N.G. Ovidio and Gonzalo Sanchez.  We were blessed because Ralston Purina was willing to do the project right, which gave us the opportunity to bring together the talent.  Later, Ron Staha and Yoshi Hirono left the project, and in 1980, I became the hatchery manager in Veracruz.  I have always enjoyed designing and working in shrimp laboratories.

 

One of my most memorable sourcing trips was with Dr. Isabel Farfante, a distinguished shrimp researcher and coauthor of Penaeoid and Sergestoid Shrimps and Prawns of the World (Keys and Diagnoses for the Families and Genera).  She was interested in sourcing and collecting specimens to illustrate the reproductive system of penaeid shrimp.  On the night that she accompanied me on a sourcing expedition, we collected vannamei, stylirostris, occidentalis and one californiensis, which was still soft from molting and carried a spermatophore plug.  When she was working on the deck it was hard to imagine she was in her sixties.  In appreciation, she sent me a copy of her original drawing of stylirostris’s reproductive system.

 

I left Agromarina in 1990.  In 1991, I did some consulting for Zeigler Bros., a shrimp feed manufacturing company in Pennsylvania, and then went to work for Zeigler full-time.  Basically, my job was to help Zeigler make better shrimp feeds.  Zeigler has always been receptive to my suggestions and is committed to shrimp nutrition from the womb to the tomb.

 

I was also involved in the inception and start-up of Belize Aquaculture, Ltd., a high-tech, zero-exchange, super-intensive shrimp farm.  I designed the pilot hatchery and recirculating maturation facility and helped with the broodstock program.  We were the first hatchery to close the breeding cycle for SPF vannamei in Belize.

 

Recently, I successfully completed work on the design of a broodsock rearing facility at Farallon Aquaculture in Panama capable of producing up to 40,000 broodstock a year.  The goal at this facility is to develope shrimp with fast growth, fecundity and disease resistance.

 

Information David Drennan, Apartado 550360 Paitilla, Panama City, Panama (phone/fax in Panama 507-213-8363, cell 507-635-2118, email panaqua_dd@cwpanama.net and aquadpd@hotmail.com).

 

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Russ Allen

 

On May 12 & 13, 2000, I visited Russell Allen, president of the United States Shrimp Farming Association and a shrimp farming consultant, in Okemos, Michigan, USA.  I asked Russ about his history in shrimp farming.  When I turned off the recorder two hours later, I had captured a great story and some important historical information on the development of shrimp farming in the Western Hemisphere.

 

In 1970, while sailing around the world, I arrived in the Galapagos Islands, liked it there, and stayed six months.  A couple of years later, in 1973, after graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in fisheries biology, I returned to Ecuador, bought a 70-foot sailboat and began running chartered tours in the Galapagos Islands.  Peter Shayne operated a shrimp processing plant in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and we frequently bumped into each other socially.  Peter played a pivotal role in the development of Ecuadorian shrimp farming!

 

In 1976, after running tours for three years, I leased my boat to a travel agency and suddenly found myself with a nice income and nothing to do.  Peter hired me as a biologist at $400 a month.  He was building his first farm in Balao, on the eastern side of the Gulf of Guayaquil, about midway between Guayaquil and Machala.  He hired two other biologists: Terry McCarthy, an American, and Juan Villegas, a Colombian (neither currently associated with shrimp farming).

 

In the mid-1970s, Ecuador exported eight to ten million pounds of shrimp a year, 99% of it boat-caught.  Farms produced 50,000 to 100,000 pounds.  Empacadora Nacional, owned by Harry Graham, another member of the small American community in Guayaquil, was the biggest processor.  Harry had a huge shrimp fishing fleet, probably more than fifty boats, in a country with a total fleet of around a hundred boats.  Empacadora Shayne had four boats.  Peter realized that the only way to beat the competition was to farm shrimp.

 

Although there were a few shrimp farms around Machala and Guayaquil, we were the first group to promote the development of shrimp farming in Ecuador.  Peter wanted to create a system that would supply his plant exclusively.  The biologists—Terry, Juan and I—got the Balao farm up and running, and then we tried to learn something about feeding shrimp.  We communicated with Yoshe Hirono and Bill MacGrath (currently shrimp farming consultants) at Ralston Purina, USA, because Purina wanted to run feed trials in Ecuador and compare the results with trials from its shrimp farm in Panama, which, at the time, had only 13 acres in phase-one development.

 

We went up to Agromarina de Panama for a couple of weeks to learn how they did things, and Yoshe taught us how to run the feed trials.  That’s when I first met Bill More, who became general manager of the farm, one of the largest and most successful in the Western Hemisphere—certainly, one of the oldest.  David Drennan (currently managing a shrimp hatchery in the Dominica Republic), Harvey Persyn (currently a successful consultant who, at the time, was working for Purina in Crystal River, Florida), Ron Staha (currently manager of a large hatchery in Panama) and Joseph Mountain (who had a long career at Granjas Marinas San Bernardo in Honduras, now the largest shrimp farm in the Western Hemisphere) were all working for Purina.

 

Later, using Purina feeds, our group introduced the first commercial shrimp feeds in Ecuador.

 

After we built the Balao farm and brought it into production, we used it as a demonstration project to expand shrimp farming in Ecuador.  We trained the first postlarvae collectors, not with push nets out in the ocean but with canoes and dip nets in the local estuaries.  We didn’t know about the coastal postlarvae resource.  We taught the collectors where to look for postlarvae, how to judge their quality, how to identify them, how to count them, how to acclimate them, and how to stock them.  In the beginning, that was ninety percent of our job.  The other farms in Ecuador pumped water into their ponds and grew whatever postlarvae came in with the water.

 

Peter made a deal with Purina to import and sell feeds.  Once a week, the biologists would visit the farms, check growth rates, set feeding schedules, and help the farmers resolve problems.  At harvest, we would make sure the shrimp got to Peter’s plant, pronto.

 

While the farms were getting started, the processing plant needed more shrimp to run efficiently.  Peter’s Ecuadorian partner, Carlos Vélez, hired people to go out at night in canoes to buy shrimp from Empacadora Nacional fishing boats, pay off the captains, and bring the shrimp back to Empacadora Shayne.  Peter would pay them a good price, process it and export it.  Soon Empacadora Shayne processed almost as much shrimp as Empacadora Nacional, which had to deploy a patrol boat to protect its fleet from the canoes.  War-like conditions existed between Empacadora Nacional and Empacadora Shayne, Hatfield and McCoy stuff, in boats, at night, off the coast of Ecuador, just a few degrees south of the equator.

 

Back then, farmers were getting up to $6 a pound for 31-35 count tails.  That was big money, and the reason the industry grew so fast.  In 1977, the shrimp farming industry was so profitable and we were developing so many farms that Peter divided the country into three sectors.  Terry got Machala; Juan got Guayaquil; and I got Manabi, on the central Ecuadorian coast.  Peter and I flew up there for one day to check things out, and I didn’t return for six months.  There was so much to do and so much interest that I designed, built and advised most of the farms in Bahia.

 

Because of the rapid growth of the industry and the processor’s bidding war, Peter started to pay too much for shrimp.  His credit line at the Bank of America in Guayaquil began to deteriorate.  To get the company moving in the right direction would take some new capital.

 

I was in Peter’s office the day Ken Morrison, an agribusinessman from Nebraska, USA, walked in and began negotiating a deal for part of the operation.  Peter, Ken and I spent about three days together—dinners, tours of the farms—discussing potential arrangements.  Peter owned the majority of Empacadora Shayne; Carlos Vélez, a minority.  Morrison bought Vélez’s share and infused new capital into the operation.  Peter got money to build Granmar, a big new farm near Salinas, and Semaqua, the first shrimp hatchery in Ecuador, but he did not have an ownership positions in them.

 

Peter, always the pirate, kept a big commission on the money that was supposed to go Vélez, so Vélez, who had planned to get out of the shrimp business, bought a derelict processing plant in Guayaquil and went into competition with Empacadora Shayne.  Since it was Vélez who had established most of Empacadora Shayne’s business with the Ecuadorian farmers, it was easy for him to grab business from Shayne.

 

By this time, the other biologist and I had made a deal with Peter for a commission on the production from the farms, but, after the deal with Morrison went through, Peter refused to pay.  So, in one day, we moved the entire team of biologists from Empacadora Shayne to Marfrut, Vélez’s new company.  When we left, Peter hired Craig Emberson on the pond side and David Curri in the hatchery—both still active in shrimp farming.

 

We negotiated a deal with Marfrut and went into competition with Empacadora Shayne and Empacadora Nacional.

 

Later, Morrison bought Peter’s share of Empacadora Shayne and changed its name to Frescamar, S.A.

 

It wasn’t long until Marfrut was the biggest exporter in Ecuador.  Vélez decided he wanted a farm as well.  In order to staff it, we needed an another biologist.  On one of my trips home to Michigan, I visited an old professor at the University of Michigan and interviewed two of his prize students: Alexander “Zandy” deBeausset (currently manager of a large shrimp farm in Guatemala) and Mark Rosenblum (currently president of the Super Shrimp Group, one of the largest shrimp farming operations in the world).  Mark got the job.  Eventually, Carlos’s pirate skills got the best of him, our deal with Marfrut ended, and I decided to leave Ecuador in 1979.

 

My wife, Liz, and I packed up all our stuff, got rid of our apartment, and bought tickets for the United States.  As we were leaving for the airport, the phone rang.  Like a fool, I answered it.  It’s Diego Ribadeneira, a big money guy in Guayaquil, saying he had someone at his house who just flew in from Hawaii that wanted to do a shrimp farm.  He talked me into to canceling the flight.  A couple of hours later, I’m in Ribadeneira’s house having lunch with Art Lowe, an American who owns a freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii)  farm in Hawaii.  He wants me to stay and do this big new project in Ecuador, but I insist on going back to the States.  I’m outta Ecuador.

 

A week later, back in my home state of Michigan, I start getting calls from Art, who had sealed a shrimp farming deal with Ribadeneira, saying: “You’ve got to help me with the farm.”  Art had a lot of experience with freshwater prawns, but, at the time, the farm in Hawaii, Lowe Aquafarms, had never grown marine shrimp.  Joe Tabra (now with the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii), Jeff Peterson (now woring of a shrimp project in Georgia, USA) and Nick Carpenter (now with Belize Aquaculture) worked for Art in Hawaii, but they were all freshwater prawn guys.  Ed Scura, a specialist in marine shrimp farming (currently running a shrimp hatchery in Florida), was their consultant and helped start Lowe Aquafarms.

 

Anyway, Art offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse, so I went back to Ecuador and designed and built Aquaspecies, a big farm, near the Taura River, about twenty miles southeast of Guayaquil.  I managed Aquaspecies from 1979-1981.  The design incorporated most of what I had learned about shrimp farming over the previous three years.

 

When I left in early 1981, Joe Tabra (currently manager of technology transfer at the Oceanic Institutre in Hawaii) became general manager and Jerome Thompson (currently a shrimp farming consultant in Florida) became farm manager.  Later, Jeff Peterson (currently a shrimp farming consultant in Florida) replaced Thompson as farm manager.  I had finally had enough of Ecuador and I wanted to go where I could do my own project, somewhere new and exiting.

 

During my time in Ecuador, I designed and built, and in some cases managed, approximately 100,000 acres of semi-intensive shrimp ponds.

 

While still working for Aquaspecies and on vacation in Michigan, I again visited my old fisheries professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  He said a buddy of his named John Snell was interested in shrimp farming.  Snell lived in Lansing, home of Michigan State University, so I paid him a visit.  He had 8,000 acres in Belize and wanted to do a big shrimp farm.  On our way back to Ecuador, Liz and I stopped in Belize to check out the site.  Sure it was different from Ecuador, but I didn’t see any reason why semi-intensive shrimp farming couldn’t be done there.

 

Liz and I went back to Guayaquil and packed our bags for a final three-month stay in the Galapagos before heading off to Belize.  I then signed a 50/50 deal with Snell.  To get the project started, we each put up some money; he supplied the land, and I supplied the expertise.  In 1982, I built four, one-acre pilot ponds to test local conditions, the first semi-intensive ponds in Belize.  Liz and I spent a year there, lived the first five months in a tent with no running water, no electricity, no refrigeration, right in the middle of the boondocks, no neighbors, no nothing, except lots of bugs!  We never saw Snell.  I got postlarvae from Aquaspecies in Ecuador, stocked the ponds, grew them out, and proved that it could be done.  The plan for the next phase of development was a 100-acre project.

 

Then Snell showed up with his own plan.  Instead of using the growth rates and production figures for vannamei in Belize, he plugged in figures for monodon production in Taiwan.  I told him that he didn’t have to fiddle with the numbers to make it work, but he insisted that the project be presented to investors with his numbers.  We parted ways.  He went on to develop a 300 to 400-acre project with $10,000 to $20,000 investments from people in Michigan.  You can talk to people around here today that were burned by Snell.  He dumped millions and millions into the project and lost every penny because he just would not listen to anybody.

 

In 1983, after splitting with Snell, I got involved with Barry Bowen, currently president of Belize Aquaculture, one of the most advanced, environmentally-friendly, shrimp farms in the world.  In fact, in 1997, I designed and built that farm, too!  But that’s another story.

 

Information: Russell Allen, Aquatic Design, Ltd., 3450 Meridian Road, Okemos, MI 48863 USA (phone 517-347-5537, fax 517-347-4999, email shrimpone@aol.com).

 

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Henry Clifford

 

On February 2, 2002, I interviewed Henry Clifford, who at the time was Technical Director of Super Shrimp, which had three mega shrimp hatcheries in Mexico, a large shrimp farm in northern Mexico and a small inland shrimp farm in Arizona, USA.

 

In April 2002, Henry resigned from Super Shrimp and joined Shrimp Improvement Systems, a Florida company that specializes in selective breeding and genetic enhancement of marine shrimp, as Technical Director.

 

Shrimp News: Hi Henry.  Tell me a little about your first steps into aquaculture.

 

Henry Clifford: I have a bachelor’s degree in marine biology from the University of Virginia (1972–1976) and received a master’s degree on the nutritional physiology of Macrobrachium from Texas A&M University in 1979.  My aquaculture career at A&M blossomed when Dr. Bob Brick—who later became vice president of Aquabiotics/King James, one of the first attempts to raise shrimp in closed systems in the United States—guided me into shrimp culture.  While at A&M, I set my sights on getting a job with Ralston Purina because I had read great things about Purina’s shrimp farming division.  Then, in December 1979, Harvey Persyn hired me to work at Purina’s Mariculture Research Center, in Crystal River, Florida, USA, a real hotbed of shrimp farming research.  By the time I got started at Crystal River, Bill MacGrath, Yoshi Hirono and Padge Beasley had already left for other shrimp farming projects.  And Joe Mountain, Ron Staha, David Drennan and Bill More were working at Purina’s shrimp venture in Panama, Agromarina de Panama.  Harvey put me in charge of nutrition R&D and feed production.  I formulated diets in Crystal River, produced them at Purina’s feed mills in St. Louis, tested them in Crystal River and then shipped them down to the farm in Panama.  While at Crystal River, I also worked with Reggie Markham and Randy Aungst, who have enjoyed long, successful careers in shrimp farming.

 

Two years later Ralston Purina decided they no longer needed the Crystal River Research Facility and closed it down, a crushing blow to me because I had aspired to work there for many, many years.  The technical staff split into two groups.  Randy Aungst and Joe Mountain followed a former Purina executive into Asia and set up shrimp farming projects in Sri Lanka and Malaysia.  Harvey and I founded Tropical Mariculture Technology (TMT), a shrimp farming consulting company, with Reggie Markham as one of our biologists.

 

Shrimp News: Was it difficult to find work?

 

Henry Clifford: No.  At the time, we had knowledge of Purina’s advanced shrimp culture technology.  We had the maturation technology that Joe Mountain and Harvey Persyn developed.  We had larval rearing technology.  We had nutrition and pond management technology.  We had the feed formulations.  We really had a complete package of technology to offer investors.  We started with small assignments in Ecuador, Malaysia and the Philippines.  We did site surveys in Asia, Africa and South America.  Among other assignments, we selected the site for the Baltek Corporation (a publicly traded U.S. corporation, which got out of the shrimp farming business in 2003) shrimp farm in Ecuador.

 

TMT’s first big project was the Maricultura da Bahia farm and hatchery in Brazil.  At the time, Brazil’s shrimp farming industry was floundering, trying to grow native species and some Penaeus japonicus that had been imported into the northeast.  No one was having much success.  Using our technology, we managed to industrialize shrimp farming in Brazil, and promoted the idea of self-sufficiency in maintaining closed-cycle stocks of shrimp.  We introduced P. vannamei and P. stylirostris to Brazil and began the domestication process with them.  We also imported monodon and penicillatus from the Tungkang Marine Science Center in Taiwan, and used them into our domestication process.  All of the shrimp stocked in the ponds at Maricultura were from our closed-cycle, domestication program.  In fact, dating back to 1980, probably my proudest accomplishment in shrimp farming is the fact I have only worked with domesticated lines of shrimp.  None of the farms where I worked stocked wild postlarvae.

 

Maricultura da Bahia was one of the first companies in the Western Hemisphere to pond-rear stylirostris and vannamei broodstock, and we might have been one of the first companies in the world to pond-rear monodon broodstock.  We were growing monodon broodstock in ponds in 1984, at a time when people were saying you couldn’t grow good quality broodstock in ponds—especially monodon broodstock.  When we left Brazil, the farm had third generation monodon, sixth generation vannamei, eighth generation stylirostris, and fourth generation penicillatus.  As far as I know, the penicillatus that we imported into Brazil in 1984 are still there—approaching their fortieth generation of domestication, probably the oldest line of domesticated shrimp in the world, older than Super Shrimp’s stylirostris and older than the French’s SPR 43 line of stylirostris.

 

Shrimp News: Who is maintaining the stocks of penicillatus?

 

Henry Clifford: Although I’m not sure, I believe they are all in the hands of one company that continues to procreate them.  Penicillatus did well in our Brazil project, but it can’t compete with vannamei.

 

Shrimp News: What about the monodon?

 

Henry Clifford: We had good success with maturation and larval rearing, but we ran into problems during growout.  We didn’t have the right feeds for monodon at the time, and so we could not get the animals past 15–16 grams in a reasonable growout period.

 

Shrimp News: Why did it take Brazil so long to come around to vannamei?

 

Henry Clifford: Brazil wanted to build its industry on indigenous species.  At Maricultura da Bahia, we changed all that.  We closed the life cycle in captivity of seven species of penaeid shrimp: vannamei, stylirostris, monodon, penicillatus, schmitti, paulensis and aztecus.  We played around with paulensis because it tolerated lower temperatures better than the other species.  But of the seven species, it was the least successful on our farm.  Paulensis is still being used on some farms in the temperate regions of southern Brazil, but vannamei remains the dominant species in Brazil.

 

Shrimp News: Did TMT have an ownership position in any of the farms it developed in Brazil?

 

Henry Clifford: No.  We were technical advisors, providing design, construction supervision, start-up and technical management services.  We had a technical services contract with Maricultura de Bahia, which was owned by a large construction company.  Interestingly, the farm was built in pure, coarse-grain beach sand.  Conventional wisdom dictates that you should not build ponds in sand, but we successfully built this farm on coarse beach sand without using plastic liners, and learned a lot in the process.  Another interesting feature of this farm was that it had a seawater and freshwater source.  Harvey engineered a structure that allowed us to mix the two sources of water so that we could control the salinity of the ponds down to 1–2 parts per thousand.  The farm expanded to 600 hectares and at the time was the largest shrimp farm in Brazil.  It had broodstock production facilities, the biggest hatchery in the country, nursery ponds and a processing plant, all located within the farm, and for a number of years it was the technology leader in Brazil.

 

Shrimp News: How did you seal the ponds?

 

Henry Clifford: We didn’t.  They sealed themselves.  During the first cycle, we were losing 10 to 12 percent of our water per day, especially in the smaller (nursery/broodstock) ponds, but due to the constant detrital rain of bacteria, algae, feces, feed and other matter on the pond bottom, the interstitial pores between the grains of sand gradually became obstructed by organic matter, and the ponds eventually sealed themselves.  By the second cycle, we were only losing 5 percent or less a day.  If you want to exchange 10-15 percent per day of water in the ponds, you don’t really care if 5 percent of that water loss is downward through the pond bottom.  After a few production cycles, water loss through seepage in our 10-hectare growout ponds was minimal.  We didn’t line any of the ponds or canals with plastic, but fortunately, we had a clay quarry nearby, which allowed us the luxury of reinforcing sections of the elevated supply canal with clay, since it had the highest hydraulic pressure of all the water transport channels.  Despite our successes, there are still compelling reasons not to build ponds in sandy soils.

 

One of the biggest challenges is to avoid “piping”, which usually occurs along the point of contact between a solid structure (for example, a concrete inlet or outlet structure) and the earthen dike.  Until we took the necessary engineering precautions, we did have problems with water seeping through the dikes around the structures, and in some cases resulting in catastrophic failure of a structure.  Also, ponds built in sandy soils tend to have problems with water seeping from full ponds into adjacent empty ponds, making pond bottom drying and preparation very problematic.

 

Shrimp News: Is Maricultura da Bahia still operational?

 

Henry Clifford: Yes.  It’s now part of the Valença Maricultura conglomerate, located just west of Salvador, in Bahia, Brazil.  It’s been a while since I was there, but I think the company has around 1,000 hectares of ponds and two hatcheries.

 

When we started, there were no other shrimp farms in the area.  Soon thereafter, however, Brazilian investors copied the lead of our client, and built several new shrimp farms all around us.

 

As our contract in Brazil was coming to an end, we signed several new technical services contracts in Colombia.  By 1988, we had eight farm management contracts in Colombia: five on the Atlantic coast near Cartagena and three in Tumaco on the Pacific coast near the border with Ecuador.  We designed several new farms from the ground up, including Cartagenera de Acuacultura and Agrosoledad, two of Colombia’s better known projects on the Atlantic Coast.  Prior to our arrival, the existing farms on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts were struggling with poor production and a lack of technical organization.  TMT implemented semi-intensive production methods and broodstock domestication programs on most of our clients’ farms, using shrimp species (stylirostris and vannamei) that were not native to Colombia’s Atlantic coast.  We brought the founding stocks for our domestication program from Panama and Ecuador and never used any wild stocks from Colombia.  In fact, the Super Shrimp strain of stylirostris was inaugurated at one of our Colombian projects.  In Colombia, we usually stocked 80 percent vannamei and 20 percent stylirostris.  Survival of the stylies was low because early on they had not yet acquired resistance to the IHHN virus, but they grew much faster than the vannamei.

 

Shrimp News: Were the projects in Colombia successful?

 

Henry Clifford: For the most part, yes.  Some of the projects that we developed were extremely successful.  We took over a couple of farms that were struggling and managed to increase their production by 100 to 200 percent.  The farms in the Cartagena area were very successful, made money and produced record yields for Colombian farms at that time.  Our projects in Tumaco were also successful, compared to the other farms around Tumaco, but for reasons intrinsic to the Pacific coast, our pond yields in Tumaco never approached the production levels achieved on the Atlantic coast, where the conditions for shrimp farming are much better.  We also designed and managed a hatchery for Cartagenera de Acuacultura.

 

Shrimp News: When did TMT do its first work in Venezuela?

 

Henry Clifford: Around 1990 we signed a contract with Aquamarina de la Costa in Venezuela.  I stayed in Colombia to manage the contracts there, while Harvey went on to Venezuela and designed a farm and hatchery for Aquamarina.  We took some of our domesticated animals from Colombia and moved them to Venezuela, initiating what soon became a very successful domestication program.  Aquamarina is now the biggest operation in Venezuela, and is very successful.

 

In 1991, I sold my shares in TMT to Harvey and shortly thereafter founded another technical services company, C&C Aquaculture Services, with Harry Cook, who had helped TMT with some of our projects in Colombia.

 

Harry has been working with shrimp longer than anyone else in the business.  He began in 1959 with the National Marine Fisheries Service, identifying the larval stages of marine shrimp.  After that, he developed a new hatchery methodology at the Galveston Marine Laboratory and later worked for Dow Chemical’s shrimp farming project.

 

C&C had several contracts in Venezuela—as technical advisor to existing farms that were having problems.  We managed to increase production at those farms by 100 to 300 percent.  One of the farms, Siembras Marinas, near Barcelona, had experienced a dramatic drop in production and had no idea why.  As it turned out, it had two problems.  Its ponds were infested with Callianassid (ghost) shrimp, which destroyed the water quality and caused survivals to drop by 50 to 60 percent.  Fortunately, I was able to help them control the ghost shrimp populations.  The same farm also had a disease problem, which had remained undiagnosed until I submitted some shrimp samples to Dr. Donald Lightner at the University of Arizona, and Don confirmed the first case of NHP (necrotizing hepatopancreatitis) in Venezuela.  Fortunately, once detected, it was a disease that could be easily managed using medicated feed.  We fixed the problems and the farm went on to be quite successful.  In addition to the two farms in Venezuela, C&C also acted as technical advisor to a large integrated project in Brazil called Atlantis Aquacultura.  Also, we were technical advisors to CAMPA, Nicaragua’s largest shrimp farming company, which was a project that Harry had initiated prior to joining C&C Aquaculture Services.

 

Shrimp News: Let’s get back to Harry Cook for a moment.  He really got started early.  What was he doing with shrimp in 1959?

 

Henry Clifford: He was working at the Galveston Laboratory of the National Marine Fisheries Service, studying the larval cycle of penaeid shrimp.  Harry was one of the first people to report on the life cycle of penaeid shrimp.  He identified the different species and made drawings of the different larval stages, published the work and then went on to do some of the very early research on Lagenidium, a fungal disease that affects larval shrimp.

 

Contrary to the current myth, which gives Corny Mock credit for the development of the Galveston hatchery technology, it was Harry Cook and his team at the National Marine Fisheries Service who did much of the original work.  Six months before he left to go to work for Dow Chemical, Harry hired Corny Mock and taught him the new Galveston methodology for rearing larval shrimp.  Harry was about to give a paper on the technology at one of the first meetings of the World Aquaculture Society when he took the job with Dow Chemical.  Corny ended up giving the presentation and somehow got credit for the early work.  Subsequent to that, Corny did make a number of improvements to the technology, but it was not Corny who did the original work.  It was Harry Cook.  Harry has also developed a proprietary software program for managing shrimp farms.

 

Shrimp News: When did you go to work for Maritech, Mark Rosenblum’s shrimp farming operation in Mexico that’s now part of the Super Shrimp Group?

 

Henry Clifford: In 1994, Maritech hired me to help with strategic planning and problem solving.  Mark had had a couple of sub-par production cycles because he was stocking the Hawaiian strain of SPF vannamei, and they weren’t doing well against Taura.  I suggested that he try stylirostris, specifically the domesticated strain that we had initiated in Colombia and Venezuela because it was resistant to IHHNV and TSV.  He mulled over the idea for about a year.  At the 1996 meeting of the World Aquaculture Society in Bangkok, Thailand, I introduced him to German Dao, who had our strain of stylirostris at his hatchery in Venezuela.  Mark and German got together and formed Super Shrimp.  When the company was fully incorporated, Mark asked me to come on board as technical director.  In 1997, a year later, when all my contracts with C&C had expired, I joined Super Shrimp full-time.  Harry also went to work for Super Shrimp, and we put C&C on the back burner.

 

Back then, Super Shrimp was a small Mexican company.  In an 18 month period, Mark grew the company from practically nothing to the world’s largest producer of disease-free, SPR postlarvae.  We were producing as much as 500 million PLs a month from three hatcheries, two in Mazatlan and one in northern Mexico, all with our domesticated strain of stylirostris.  At the time we had some very experienced hatchery managers—Josh Wilkenfeld, David Pavel and Alfredo Medina—running our hatcheries.

 

Super Shrimp industrialized the hatchery business in Mexico by convincing the farmers that lab-reared larvae could produce superior results over wild PLs.  We were the first company to produce exclusively domesticated shrimp.  We converted Mexico—at that time the second largest shrimp producing nation in the Americas—from an industry 100 percent dependent on vannamei to an industry in which stylirostris was the dominant culture species.  We were the first supplier to deliver PLs directly to the farmer as part of our obligation.  Prior to our arrival, farmers had to go to the hatcheries and take delivery of PLs at their own risk.  We transported the larvae in 18–20 ton converted milk tanker trucks.  We had customers that were located a thousand kilometers away from the hatchery.  We could ship them six to seven million PLs at a time, chilled, in perfect condition.  On some days we were shipping 15–20 million PLs to our client’s farms.

 

We were the first hatchery to sell only PL-15s.  Prior to our arrival in Mexico, hatcheries typically sold PL-8s and PL-12s.  Contrary to previous practices, we were the first PL supplier that did not offer credit to Mexican shrimp farmers.  We had a premium product, a domesticated, genetically improved SPR (specific pathogen resistant) shrimp, the farms wanted it, and they paid up front for it.  We also insisted on our clients signing long-term contracts, another first in Mexico.  We were the first hatchery to offer comprehensive technical support to all clients at no charge.  With our larvae came a team of experienced farm managers and technical advisors as part of Super Shrimp’s Technical Services Division.  That was my department.  Our technical services advisors were mostly former production managers at big farms.  At one point we had over a 100 clients, and we taught them how to farm stylirostris.  We did not just sell them larvae, we also helped them with their production problems.  We were the first hatchery company to offer free pathology services to our customers from our disease diagnosis lab managed by Dr. Ken Hasson.  We provided technical workshops on a large scale.  Sometimes two hundred people would attend our workshops.  We provided our customers with a monthly technical newsletter and a proprietary manual that I wrote on how to grow stylirostris.

 

Shrimp News: Are the hatcheries still producing stylirostris?

 

Henry Clifford: They produce whatever species mix the farmers want.  Right now, the two hatcheries in Mazatlan produce mostly vannamei.  The hatchery in northern Mexico produces stylirostris almost exclusively.  We also produced small amounts of SPF vannamei at that hatchery for stocking the company’s freshwater inland farm in Arizona.

 

Information: Henry Clifford, Shrimp Improvement Systems, Inc., 88005 Overseas Highway, No. 10-166, Islamorada, Florida, 33036 USA (phone 619-840-4808, fax 305-852-0874, email hcclifford@aol.com).

 

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Larry Drazba

 

On Saturday, May 5, 2001, I interviewed Larry Drazba, general manager of a 700-hectare, semi-intensive shrimp farm and processing plant in  Nicaragua.

 

Shrimp News: Tell me a little about your educational background and your first steps into aquaculture and shrimp farming.

 

Larry Drazba: In 1976, I graduated from Loyola University in Los Angeles, California, USA, with a major in biology, a minor in chemistry and an eye on marine biology.  My first job?  A research assistant at Tap Pryor’s System Culture Corporation in Hawaii, where I grew algae for oyster larvae.  Greg Emberson, currently a shrimp farming consultant, managed the oyster farm.  I was there for two years, from 1976 to 1978.  In the spring of 1978, I decided to return to the mainland and go back to school.  In the winter of 1978, I began working on a master’s degree at the University of California/Davis.  At the time, Serge Doroshov, Wally Clark, Fred Conte and Graham Gall were involved with the aquaculture program at UC Davis.  It was an exciting time because sturgeon farming was just getting started in California.

 

I did my master’s thesis under Graham Gall, a geneticist, who was raising mosquito fish to control mosquitos in California’s rice fields.  We grew them in stacked trays in a heated environment and seeded them from planes.  I was at Davis for about a year-and-a-half and that’s where I met my wife Monica.

 

I graduated in 1980, with a master’s degree in International Agriculture Development (although my thesis was in culturing mosquito fish).  Most of my course work was in agriculture, economics, sociology and technology transfer to third world countries.  I was determined to go overseas.  A classmate at Davis offered me a partnership with his family in a prawn farm (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) in Mexico.  In June 1980, Monica and I gathered up our limited possessions and moved to Mexico—and we have been living out of the country for 21 years now.

 

At the time, not many people were working with prawns in Mexico.  Durwood Dugger, currently a shrimp farming consultant, was doing something in northeast Mexico; Miguel Avila Tamayo was down in Colima; Jamie Dominguez was in Acapulco; and there was one other group on the Gulf Coast.  At the time, marine shrimp farming was reserved for cooperatives, so freshwater prawn farming appeared to be a good alternative for the private sector.  We set up shop in Barra de Navidad, Jalisco.  I had two projects, one in Tecomán, Colima, and one in Chihuatlán, Jalisco.  We were there for 3 1/2 years, from 1980 to mid-1983.  It was the end of the oil boom in Mexico and we experienced the first devaluation in 1981.  We were doomed, but did not know it at that point.  A lost decade loomed in our future.

 

After a couple of years, we came to the realization that prawns were just not doing very well in Mexico.  The animals did not grow as fast as they did in other places.  We didn’t know why, but the productivity was not good.  We concluded that prawn farming was not going to be a good business on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.  In 1983, we got out of that business.  The prawn hatchery worked; the problem was growout.  We just could not grow enough animals fast enough to make a profit.

 

Then a gentleman from the Gulf Coast of Mexico offered an opportunity to try prawn farming in the state of Vera Cruz.  So we moved there in mid-to-late-1983 and started an operation with a family out of Mexico City.  We had two small growout operations in Vera Cruz, where conditions for prawn farming were supposed to be much better than those on the Pacific Coast.  But the conditions were about the same, and then we ran into an unforeseen problem.  It can get real cold on the Gulf Coast of Mexico because there is nothing between Canada and Mexico but barbed wire.  Those winter cold fronts that dip into the United States from Canada frequently continue right down the Gulf Coast to Mexico.  It can get very cold in the winter, prawns don’t like that, and they don’t grow well.  We ran the hatchery in the winter, head-started the larvae in nurseries in the spring, and hoped to get a good crop over the summer and early fall, before the cold fronts hit in late October.

 

We lived in a peso economy.  Prawn farming was still experimental and the projects were very small, we had to make them commercial or lose them because there was no financial support.  I did some consulting to survive, worked for the Agricultural Development arm of the Mexican National Bank and trained bank officials in appraising aquaculture loans.  It was a lot of traveling from project to project, I learned a lot about aquaculture and project management as well as the Latin culture and Spanish language, but economically we were going no where and the projects folded.

 

For the first half of the 1980s, one industry after another collapsed in Mexico.  Things kept getting worse and worse.  Then, in 1985, just as things started to get better under the De la Madrid Administration, a huge earthquake crumpled Mexico City.  Any money that was available was sucked into Mexico City, not for the rebuild, just for the clean up.  It was a real mess, devastating, and with that the country slipped again.  So in early 1986, we decided that it was time to move on.

 

I mailed my resume to people who might be interested in my talents.  I received the strongest response from Blair Smith at Delarvas, S.A., in Ecuador, and took a job working at his spawning station in Esmeraldas for a short time.

 

My real experience in Ecuador started after leaving Delarvas.  For the next five years, I worked with Robert Moss on two projects: Megalarvas, S.A., a shrimp hatchery in Manabi Province, and El Portillo, S.A., a shrimp farm in Guayas Province.  Although I had experience with freshwater prawn, oyster and fish hatcheries, this was my first work with shrimp.  Yasu Akamine was my mentor.  We started the hatchery first, right at the beginning of the 1986-1987 El Niño.  With wild seed cheap and abundant, the hatchery struggled for two years.  In 1988, we started the shrimp farm to take advantage of the boom in Ecuadorian shrimp farming and to give the hatchery a market for its seed.  I had three years on that farm, the first was very slow, coinciding with the La Niña of 1988.  The next two years were excellent.

 

By this time, Monica and I had been out of the country for ten years.  We were very content living overseas, but for whatever reason, I did not feel at home in Ecuador.  I was offered an opportunity to join Ed Scura on a shrimp farming project in Guatemala, Fincas Aquaticas, S.A., and accepted.  I spent three years in Guatemala working on this project (and briefly for Pesca, S.A., a Guatemalan shrimp farm run by Ladex Corp.).  Fincas Aquaticas did not do well commercially.  The location was very difficult, the water quality seasonal—and production dropped dramatically during the dry season.

 

At the time, Robins McIntosh was running feed trials for Zeigler at the farm and also working for Fincas Aquaticas on the cause of the dry season problems.  Conversations with Robins about nutrition, water quality, and, especially, the microbial community in shrimp ponds, have had a great influence on my current shrimp farming strategy.

 

In 1995, Andy Kuljis (currently president of Aquatic Farms, a consulting company) of Amorient called with the offer of a job in México.  By this time, the Guatemalan project needed logistical management more than biological expertise, and Monica was very anxious to return to México.  We bundled up the four children and moved to Mazatlán, Sinaloa, to work for AquaNova, S.A.  It had been almost seven years since leaving México and the country was very different.  We did not like living in Mazatlán, a tourist town, because we were used to living in rural areas with more native charm.

 

The AquaNova project was very interesting.  It gave me the opportunity to participate in the start up of the SPR 43 (specific pathogen resistant) Penaeus stylirostrus program in México.  France Aquaculture (a consulting company with links to the French Government, but no longer in business) sold AquaNova a complete technology package for farming IHHN resistant stylirostrus in Mexico.  It was the first time I had seen a packaged deal for shrimp farming technology and thought it was a good approach.

 

The production potential was incredible at AquaNova because the stylies were very fast growing and production technologies developed by the French combined with the good water quality in México yielded excellent results, but it would be very difficult for AquaNova to meet its ambitious development plan under the existing political system in México.  I left before the commercial project really got under way.

 

In late 1995, I receive a phone call from Jeffrey Graham (Enaca/Ecuador) about a shrimp farming opportunity in Nicaragua.  Jeffrey was involved in a project there and needed a project manager.  I took the job.

 

Shrimp News: Before you get into your experiences in Nicaragua, how about a brief history of shrimp farming in Nicaragua?

 

Larry Drazba: In Latin America, most shrimp farms are well-capitalized large-scale operations.  In Nicaragua, however, government sponsored cooperative farms are a major part of the industry and, in fact, launched it with the construction of the first ponds in the late 1980s.  But important development of the industry did not occur until 1993 when both privately owned companies and more cooperatives jumped into the business.  There was tremendous growth during 1994 and 1995 and farmed shrimp became a major export item, approximately $15 million, for the first time.  With a couple of good years behind it, the industry experienced another wave of investment in 1995.

 

Unfortunately, the next four years brought one catastrophe after another.  First Taura.  Then Mitch.  And then whitespot.

 

In 1998, we were recovering from the Taura virus, the industry was optimistic, farms were expanding—and then Hurricane Mitch happened.  The big private sector farms near the mouth of the estuary were not hit as hard as the cooperative farms in the upper part of the estuary, where water levels rose three meters and wiped out most of the farms and carried the crop out to sea.  With the local infrastructure destroyed and costs rising, the private sector struggled, but it recovered relatively quickly after Mitch.

 

Those that responded the quickest were Camarones del Pacifico (CAMPA, one of the biggest farms), Sahlman Seafood de Nicaragua, Nicaragua Camaronera, S.A. (which is Mario Callejas, a long-term shrimp farmer from Ecuador, who is Nicaraguan and back in the country operating a 500-hectare farm), and our company, Camanica, S.A.  Since the private sector farms came through Mitch in pretty good shape, they were heavily stocked in January 1999—when whitespot hit.  Pre-whitespot survivals were 35%; post-whitespot, 5% to 10%.  It looked like the end of the world for shrimp farming in Nicaragua.

 

Shrimp News: How did your company survive all of this?

 

Larry Drazba: After Mitch but before whitespot, we had a board meeting and looked at everything.  The banks restructured our financing, but would not put up any working capital.  We needed to recapitalize.  Our original partners refused to come up with any new money and abandoned the project.  In March 1999, I was asked to close the operation, but decided to keep it running to support our 150 to 160 permanent employees and up to 800 temporary employees in the processing plant.  I spent a year looking for a white knight to come in and help pick up the pieces.

 

During this time, I produced a little seed and processed a little product.  All income was put back into the farm.  Production started to go up a little.  We were basically living hand to mouth for 15 months.  A couple of times we came close to selling the farm, but the investors never came up with the money.

 

Then, in early 2000, when I didn’t have enough money to stock the ponds, I gave Jeffrey Graham, who was working for Eastern Fish Company (the Bloom Family) in the United States, a call.  Jeffrey was working on Eastern’s buyer diversification program, a program designed to reduce Eastern’s dependency on Ecuadorian farmed shrimp.  I asked Jeffrey if the Blooms would be interested in taking a position in Nicaraguan shrimp farming.  They were!  Two days later I had a check for operating expenses.  The farm was up and running again!  Without the Blooms, the company would have failed.  I am tremendously grateful for their support.

 

In August 2000, we managed to negotiate a deal with the bank to buy the assets, so now all the assets are in a company called Camarones de Nicaragua (Camanica, S.A.)—everything, the hatchery, the processing plant and the farms.  The Blooms got involved in Nicaragua as a carry over measure until another group came along who were more production oriented.  That group has not appeared yet and in the meantime together we have managed to get the operation back to 100%.

 

Information: LarryDrazba, Camanica, S.A., Km. 130 Carretera, Chinandega, León, Nicaragua (phone 505-341-1628, fax 505-341-3744, ldrazba@ibw.com.ni).

 

Source: Bob Rosenberry, Shrimp News International.  March 2005.