The Job

Aquaculture.

I had never heard of this concept or the field of work it represents until reading the job application.

Which job application was that? Why, the one for HZ University of Applied Sciences, where I now work.

Aquaculture is the department I work in and it is so much more than I ever thought it was.

I remember struggling to describe my job and what exactly I would be doing out here in the Netherlands before I left. It was a challenge to be sure, and I must admit that I tried to sound much more confident and informed than I really was. Now that I am here and fully immersed in all that the aquaculture of the Netherlands has to offer me (mostly a lot of salt water) I can properly describe to you what it is and how it relates to my work.

Let me begin with some literature - The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines aquaculture as the following:

—

aquacultural

play \ˌä-kwə-ˈkəl-ch(ə-)rəl, ˌa-\ adjective

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aquaculture

transitive verb

—

aquaculturist

play \-ch(ə-)rist\ noun

: the cultivation of aquatic organisms (such as fish or shellfish) especially for food

An example of such a shellfish is the common blue mussel (Mytilus edulis for all you Latin folk). This is the subject of the majority of my study. Mussel farmers own or rent what are called ocean plots, which is just a plot of land in the ocean where they lay mussel seed (baby mussels; it's not an actual 'seed'). After a few years they can scoop up all the mussels and harvest them for food production.

This sounds like a simple and easy enterprise, however just like any kind of farming, there are some hitches.

The specific obstacle I am concerned with is the massive amount of predation that occurs by starfish. They drastically reduce the harvest of mussel farmers because of the number of mussels they consume on the ocean floor. So farmers have a strategy called the 'freshwater treatment' where they scoop up everything on the ocean floor from their plot of land and dump it into freshwater held in the ship's hull. This is called dredging.

Naturally, a lot of starfish get dredged up along with the mussels, and are also dumped into the freshwater. This proves very unfortunate for them. Mussels can close their shells and survive in freshwater for quite a few hours, whereas the starfish cannot last nearly so long.

Mussel farmers are looking for an optimum length of time for which to keep the mussels and starfish in the freshwater so that they reach the highest level of starfish mortality, but the lowest possible number of mussel mortalities.

This is where my research comes in.

Two experiments by interns like myself have been done on this topic already, experimenting with mussels to create this optimization program for farmers to use. However these two experiments culminated in very different results. Thus, I am doing similar experiments to what they did, but my purpose is to figure out why there was such variation and discrepancy between their results.

The experiments themselves are fairly straightforward and simple, but I know that all my work is going to be used by real people to make their jobs easier and more efficient.

It has been very busy but I relish in the opportunity to be useful and used to make the lives of others better.

LOL - Lots Of Love

Briar