LOBSTER BOOM SET TO ROCK W
ITHIN the next decade a restaurant in South-east Asia could be serving up a deliciously cooked rock lobster that grew up in an aquaculture facility at Toomulla Beach after being born in a tank in Tasmania.
There is about a 10,000-tonne shortfall of the popular shellfish globally due to a growing middle class throughout Asia, and Townsville is set to be the base that feeds that appetite.
The State Government last week announced Tasmania-based aquaculture company Ornatas had picked a site at Toomulla Beach to build the world’s first land-based lobster farm.
Ornatas chief executive Scott Parkinson said the plan was to spark a new $500 million industry and create 1000 jobs, not unlike the boom of the prawn farming industry that sprouted in the 1980s.
“We picked Townsville as the centre that we wanted to be close to,” he said.
“It’s a well-resourced centre, there’s a large population base, you’ve also got the likes of James Cook University, so you’ve already got an aquaculture program training people.”
HATCHING DISCOVERIES
Ornatas is a Tasmanian-owned company created about 18 months ago to monetise the cracking of the rock lobster breeding code, led by researchers at the University of Tasmania.
“With rock lobster research, it’s been 20 years in the making,” Associate Professor Greg Smith said.
“The work that we’ve done here at the University of Tasmania has been to complete the larval cycle in a comA TASMANIAN COMPANY HAS DETAILED ITS PLANS TO DEVELOP A MULTIMILLIONDOLLAR SHELLFISH FARM AT TOOMULLA BEACH, REPORTS
MADURA MCCORMACK
mercial way. The larval cycle of the spiny rock lobster is long and difficult, in the wild it takes six to 12 months to complete.”
Scientists have now developed various techniques to shorten the life cycle and in a way that can produce tens of thousands of lobster babies.
This included creating artificial diets for larvae development, figuring out how to treat water so it resembles “high-quality” ocean, and how to mass rear larvae to the next stage of growth.
Previously, only a small amount of the animal could be grown by using unsustainable practices, Prof Smith said, including the use of antibiotics and catching juvenile lobsters from the wild.
The dem a n d for juvenile lobsters has increased to about 10 million a year, depleting wild stocks.
“In the last ten years we’ve had a couple of large grants that has allowed us, with a large team of researchers, to focus on a number of aspects of the problem,” Prof Smith said.
“All around the world no one has been successful in cracking the code until we have here in the University of Tasmania.”
Once the troupe of scientists, which included experts in nutrition, genetics, physiology, larval biology, and engineers, found the secret sauce, they went to work attempting to do the same on the Moreton Bay bug.
Turns out they were much farther along than they thought.
CHRISTMAS BUGS
So that is where Ornatas will kick off its business. The Toomulla Beach site is expected to be ready by June 2020 and the first batch of farmed Moreton Bay bugs is set to hit the market by Christmas.
Meanwhile, the boffins in Tasmania will continue to work on perfecting the rock lobster process.
Ornatas is also building a $15 million tropical rock lobsters hatchery in Hobart that will be in production by 2021. “To do a grow-out you need to do it closer to where these guys are naturally, which is Queensland,” Mr Parkinson said.
By the time the first batch of Moreton Bay bugs leaves the facility, a total of 25 staff will be working on site with that number set to increase as production ramps up.
The Toomulla Beach facility will produce about 150 tonnes of Moreton Bay bugs over the next five years, before Ornatas begins working through the processes to ramp up into rock lobster production.
PICKING TOOMULLA
The site of Ornatas’ aquaculture facility, 40km north of Townsville just before the Toomulla Beach turn-off, has existed since 1985.
It was the second prawn farm to ever exist in Australia.
And the site wasn’t chance.
University of Tasmania Associate Professor Greg Smith, one of the scientists who cracked the rock lobster aquaculture code, is a Townsville boy who worked as a technician at the Toomulla facility in 1986.
“I actually know the picked site by pretty