Melbourne mussel farmers use tourism to boost the shellfish's sustainable consumption
ABC reports on Lance Wiffen, a Melbourne fisherman working to educate the wider public about the virtues of mussels and the sustainability of Victoria's farmed mussel industry. His tourism venture takes visitors around Port Phillip Bay to enjoy local seafood and wines, and see mussel leases up close.
"The people of Victoria own this water; the people of Australia own this water; we just lease it off them so it's important that they're happy with what we're doing,"
Halfway into the cruise they weigh anchor beside one of the leases and haul up rope lines teeming with mussels and other marine life. The ropes are part of a vast underwater network of leases across the bay which provided the shellfish with a habitat and the mussel farmers with the ability to haul in the mussels for harvest after about a year. Mussel farming supports lots of other marine life.
Mussel farmers had previously relied on scooping up buckets of seawater laden with the microscopic larvae, raising it in tanks and releasing it back into the bay until the shellfish were mature enough to harvest. However trying to encourage the mussels to breed in captivity is difficult. So they established their own hatchery where they could control spat production. By replicating natural spawning conditions the hatchery has managed to produce millions of shellfish annually.
They have been fed a special algal mixture until big enough to attach to special ropes, then deposited in the nutrient-rich waters of the bay until they reached harvestable size.
Mussels are filter feeders, so they help to avert environmental problems such as algal blooms, and they also store carbon in their shells, so they are actually considered a carbon sink.
Mr Wiffen said he wanted to see the area of sea leases expanded to meet growing demand. His sentiment was shared by Peter Lillie of Yumbah Aquaculture. His business has moved to double its 90 hectares of sea lease that has produced 500 tonnes of mussels a year.
"Some scientists are saying that mussels could be the food that feed the world going forward because the population is going to need to eat something and where can they get high protein from that's not damaging the environment." he said.