BACKGROUND: Issues & Solutions

Issue: Viral Diseases in Wild Shrimp
Solution: Specific Pathogen Free Stocks

Poor performance of infected wild stocks has led to the development of quarantine and diagnostic technology to identify individual shrimp which are specific pathogen free (SPF). These stocks are then maintained and bred in biosecure facilities for the purpose of producing SPF offspring for stocking ponds.

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Issue: Switch from Infected Black Tiger Shrimp to SPF Pacific White Shrimp
Solution: Development of SPF lines of Black Tiger Shrimp

High performance lines of SPF shrimp have been developed for Pacific white shrimp, but Asian production of black tiger shrimp is still based on wild infected stocks. Poor performance of black tiger shrimp has led to the widespread introduction of SPF lines of non-indigenous white shrimp throughout much of Asia. While white shrimp offer some advantages over black tiger shrimp in terms of feed efficiency, their small size limits their value. Black tiger shrimp remain the best choice for production of premium large sizes.

High performing SPF lines of black tiger shrimp are not yet commercially available. The estimated demand for black tiger shrimp postlarvae is approximately 5.3 billion per month with an estimated annual value of $250 million.

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Issue: Declining Shrimp Prices
Solution: Reduced Production Costs through Selective Breeding

A secondary advantage of domestication and breeding programs is the ability to select for specific traits such as fast growth and disease resistance. Experience shows that growth rate can be accelerated by 10-15% per generation through selective breeding. Such a potential for steady improvement in performance promises to be the single biggest factor to change the shrimp farming sector, just as it has the poultry, swine, and cattle industries.

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Issue: Bacterial Disease and Antibiotic Usage in Larval Rearing
Solution: Modularization, All-in/All-out, Sanitation, and Probiotics

Bacterial diseases are a serious problem in shrimp larval culture. They inevitably become established within a few production cycles and steadily worsen. The only solution is to disinfect the facility, but this requires that all tanks be harvested and all pipelines, airlines, algae, and artemia systems be emptied and dried for several days. Given that large facilities may require well over a month to fully restock, the break in production caused by a dry out can be 60 days.

To avoid this loss of production time, many larval culture facilities resort to the use of antibiotics to keep bacterial diseases in check. This is a poor solution, because bacteria quickly develop resistance to individual antibiotics and ultimately to cocktails of several antibiotics at once. In addition, detection of any antibiotic residue in end products can lead to detention and even destruction of container-load shipments.

To assure continual production without use of antibiotics, modern hatcheries use a combination of techniques including strict sanitation, probiotic inoculation, and modularized all-in/all-out design.

• Effective sanitation demands that all surfaces are constructed of non porous materials that are easily drained, dried, and disinfected.
• Probiotics are live beneficial bacteria cultures that are intentionally inoculated into disinfected culture water to discourage colonization by pathogenic cultures.
• Modularization implies that the overall production system is broken into multiple production sections (modules) which can be independently dried out and disinfected after each cycle. This assures continual uninterrupted overall production.
• All-in/all-out management means that each module is completely stocked during a short time interval and completely dried out and disinfected after each cycle.

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