The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Lobsters keep on flipping
Thanks to a New Glasgow engineer, seafood brokers in Dubai will be able to keep lobsters from Atlantic Canada healthy and alive longer in the Middle Eastern climate.
Philip Nickerson, founder and president of Aqua Production Systems in Union Centre, Pictou County, has been tinkering with lobster pound systems for about a decade, since he learned of the challenges keeping lobsters alive for market.
He has installed systems for several Atlantic Canadian lobster companies, enabling them to keep up to 200,000 pounds of lobster alive and well for months.
Smaller versions of his specially designed equipment are also getting interest from customers in places like the Middle East and the Far East.
Nickerson said he's sold some of his importer tank systems — designed to hold anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 lobsters — to customers in South Korea and Vietnam but it meant having to travel to those countries to set up the system. He's working on one that can easily be set up by a customer at any location.
Meanwhile, Nickerson's systems have been helping lobster pound managers keep their lobsters, and their businesses, healthy, especially during the year of COVID.
Nickerson is an aquaculture engineer who spent 10 years working on a halibut farm in Clarks Harbour, N.S. That's also lobster territory. “Down there you're surrounded by lobster pounds. And I happened to get talking to the owner of one of them one day about some of the struggles they had,” Nickerson told Saltwire.
Managing an indoor lobster pound is particularly challenging in the summer. Keeping water temperatures low and oxygen levels at optimum levels in indoor tanks requires a lot of electricity, and expense, to run filtration, oxygen and chilling machines.
Nickerson came up with a design that not only improves oxygen distribution in the holding pound but uses less power to run a more efficient chilling and filtration system.
About four years ago, he tweaked the system, enabling alerts to be sent to an iphone to let the pound manager know if equipment or water quality needed to be checked manually.
IMPROVING SALES, REDUCING COSTS
Royal Star Seafoods of Tignish was one of the first live lobster holding facilities on Prince Edward Island to have Nickerson's system.
They've been using it for about eight years, said general manager Francis Morrissey.
He said it has definitely helped reduce lobster mortality and some costs of running 14 holding tanks. It's also helped their sales strategy, he said. They're able to hold lobsters longer to maintain a more consistent supply to customers and time sales for periods when market prices are higher.
With the added impacts of COVID-19, Morrissey said, the ability to hold and keep lobsters healthy for longer was crucial.
The arrival of the pandemic and shutdown of the foodservice industry meant a lot of seafood processors had to stockpile product.
“We have no problem to hold lobsters for four to six months.”
Nickerson's system has also enabled a Newfoundland and Labrador fish processor to expand its presence in the live lobster market. Chris Fong, facility manager for Quin Sea Fisheries, told Saltwire they decided to test the system at the New Harbour facility in 2018.
Fong said they were a little leery whether the system would work as well as Nickerson's company promised, with a near-zero lobster mortality rate.
That first year, they handled 30,000 pounds of lobster. This year, Fong said, Quin Sea handled 200,000 pounds.
“We ran well under two per cent lobster mortality this year,” he said, crediting not only the equipment but the knowledge provided by the Aqua Production Systems team.
Fong said the benefits of the system extended to the local economy. This year they hired 30 more people to handle the lobster.
He calls it a game changer. The Nickerson system, said Fong, means they can hold lobsters caught in the spring for sales through the year, even into December.
Nickerson's system has also resulted in some cost savings for the company.
“The power bills used to be astronomical at this plant,” he said, “and now we're only running 10 per cent of the power here ... because of the lobster system alone.
“Historically, you'd see 40 horsepower motors, and big plate freezers and such. Right now we're running some small chiller barrels and some little five horsepower motors. This (system) lowered our carbon footprint 10-fold.”
FISHING BOATS, TOO
The systems are not limited to use in lobster pounds.
Maurice Muise, the company's vice-president of business development, said they've also built systems for oyster operations and fin fish hatcheries, as well as for fishing boats.
A couple of crab harvesters in Nova Scotia are using Nickerson's holding tank system, recirculating seawater to keep catches alive until they land at the wharf.
And COVID-19 has kept the company busy. This time last year, they had four employees.
“During COVID we had to buy a new building to triple our space, and we ended up hiring a few more people, as well,” said Nickerson.
Now they employ nearly a dozen.
Meanwhile, Nickerson continues to brainstorm ideas to benefit aquaculture.
“I'm just passionate about solving these problems because lobster is a big business, and if we're killing 10 per cent of it that's low-hanging fruit and we can add value to what we're exporting and bring more money into our provinces.”