Israel and Ireland have teamed up to develop a project involving the world's most expensive shellfish abalone. The unique food chain developed by an Israeli scientist and Irish marine biologist uses waste from fish farms to cultivate seaweed which is in turn fed to abalone.
Even as Camp David talks on his homeland's future continued late last week, Israel's chief scientist for agriculture, Prof Dan Levenon, was flying over Connemara in a fixed wing aircraft as part of a briefing on the project. The aerial tour was hosted by the Martin Ryan Marine Science Institute at NUI Galway, which is one of the partners in the initiative.
Abalone can cost between £30,000 and £100,000 a tonne, and world markets are very under-supplied. The shell alone can fetch a tidy little sum, as Dr John Mercer of NUI Galway's Shellfish Research Laboratory at Carna told the Israeli delegation during the briefing when he held up a little souvenir he had purchased in Jerusalem.
It was during a chance meeting between Dr Mercer and an Israeli scientist, Dr Muki Shpigel, at a European Aquaculture Society conference six years ago that the idea first arose. Both men decided to look at the feasibility of combining technologies to construct an environmentally-friendly system that would ultimately provide abalone with a protein-rich sustainable diet.
Specific cultivation of abalone had been developed at the Carna laboratory, but a significant cost factor in production was supplying the high quality diet. Scientists at the National Centre for Mariculture in Israel had developed a technology to convert waste organic nitrogen from land-based fish farms into large-scale production of protein-rich seaweed. In addition, the algae also cleaned the sea water by removing the nitrogenous waste a procedure known as phycodepuration.
Dr Mercer said that it had been estimated that approximately nine kilos of finfish produced 70 kilos of micro-algae which fed some 20 kilos of abalone. The early scientific investigations were funded under an EU International Co-operation Programme, and the EU Innovation Programme supported the follow-up by the two research institutes at Carna in Co Galway and at Eilat in Israel. Two industry partners, Seaor Marine in Israel, and Boet Mor Seafoods in Ireland, also became involved.
The Israeli delegation was given some indication of the scale of the aquaculture industry here, now worth £60 million. It was now akin to Ireland's coastal commercial fishery, without the supertrawlers, Dr Mercer said. Dr Michael Guiry of the Martin Ryan institute, described how the centre was one of five flagships of the university, and a new plan for marine food has been developed by Mr Declan Clarke, a scientist specialising in aquaculture who recently moved to the university from Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM).
Prof Levenon was joined on the aerial tour by Prof Iognaid O Muircheartaigh, the college's president-elect. The flight took in mussel and salmon cultivation on Killary harbour, and both shellfish and finfish farms stretching from Cleggan to Kilkerrin. The Israeli scientist was on a week's visit to Ireland, and and also met officials from Teagasc, University College, Cork, BioResearch Ireland and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.