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Shrimp and Shrimping Information


An Oral History of Shrimp Farming in the Western Hemisphere

To SEARCH, hit control-F; to find the next occurrence of your search, hit control-G.

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.

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).

 

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).

 

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.&nbs