Early life stage bottlenecks of carnivorous molluscs under captivity: a challenge for their farming and contribution to seafood production

Abstract

This work brings together the view of different specialists in the areas of larviculture, physiology, ecology, nutrition and animal health, regarding how to deal with the aquaculture farming of species with complex life cycles in a multidisciplinary way, using as models the octopus and the muricid C. concholepas, with the aim of reducing the gap between the experimental and the industrial culture of species that are relevant for the diversification of aquaculture, particularly in Chile. Although these species are similar in their difficulty to reach the terminal planktonic phase prior to juvenile, they differ in the bottlenecks they have to overcome to reach it. Relevant aspects of study to achieve juvenile production from early life stages rearing, whether for repopulation or for ongrowing, are as follows: (i) Replacement or supplementation of live diets with inert diets to achieve significant survival values over the first stages of life. (ii) Physiological approaches to establish cultivation conditions evaluating the individual responses to several rearing conditions, specially the interaction between temperature, dissolved oxygen and acidity. Studies of urgent character due to the global warming scenario. (iii) Genomic studies associated with the effect of ontogenetic development, environment, health and nutrition on gene expression to understand, in an integrated way, the key processes for the development and growth of immature stages. (iv) Studies on the control of reproduction, the quality control of the ova, the genetic structure of reproductive populations and the characterization of diseases are also necessary to achieve efficient hatchery technologies.

De novo transcriptome reconstruction in aquacultured early life stages of the cephalopod Octopus vulgaris

“…Besides the interest in the developmental stages from embryos to adults in areas such as evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) or marine ecology, O. vulgaris is highly appreciated for human consumption with an elevated market price 24 . Due to the increased demand on marine products as protein supply, this species was postulated as a good candidate for aquaculture diversification 25 – 27 . Contrary to other marine species whose commercial culture have been successfully achieved, the octopus rearing remains unsolved due to an important lack of information regarding appropriate environmental parameters and nutritional requirements to assure a correct development and proper establishment in the benthic media 25 , 28 – 32 .…”

Bringing Disciplines and People Together to Characterize the Plastic and Genetic Responses of Molluscs to Environmental Change

“…Even so, no cephalopod taxon has emerged as a focus of study connecting genetic variation to phenotypes relevant to climate change. The absence of such a cephalopod model for evolutionary response to climate change might be linked to widespread challenges associated with laboratory culture, the difficulty of studying deep-water taxa, their large and often highly repetitive genomes, and the hundreds of millions of years separating cephalopods from other, better characterized animal taxa ( Xavier et al 2015 ; O'Brien et al 2018 ; Uriarte et al 2019 ).…”

Assessment of culture density and prey availability for the management of cannibalism in paralarvae of Patagonian red octopus Enteroctopus megalocyathus

“…megalocyathus under captivity has been completed, and its culture was possible until commercial size (Farías et al, 2016; Uriarte & Farías, 2014). The culture of this species shown its high growth rate, reaching commercial size in 2.5 years after hatching with a weight of 2.5 to 3 kg (Uriarte et al, 2019). The paralarval stage lasts between 90 to 114 days (Uriarte & Farías, 2014), after an embryonic development of 135 to 172 days, depending on the temperature (Uriarte et al, 2014, 2016).…”

“…In general, the low survival in the paralarval culture of octopus has been attributed to nutritional deficiencies of the provided preys (Iglesias & Fuentes, 2014). Nutritional quality can be overcome through the selection of wild living foods, or by the Artemia enrichments providing supplementation of essential fatty acids or vitamins (Hernández et al, 2019;Navarro et al, 2014;Roo et al, 2017;Uriarte et al, 2018). In addition, the standardization of prey density and feeding dose, as well as paralarval density, are relevant aspects of the culture system, and should be considered to improve the survival and growth of these planktonic organisms (Iglesias et al, 2007).…”