World’s first lobster aquaculture industry prepares for take-off

At Toomulla Beach, Northwest of Townsville, the world’s first onshore lobster farming industry is taking shape. From the entry side it’s a nondescript building; it could be a storage shed. Once inside, after removing shoes and washing hands to avoid contamination, you’re in darkness. Torchlight reveals rows of shelves full of black plastic ponds, which hold lobsters at various stages of the larval cycle. Near the shelves is a sophisticated plumbing system linked to dozens of tanks behind the building. 

The building is a hatchery for Tropical Rock Lobsters, designed to take 90,000 juveniles right through their complex life cycle – from hatchery to harvest. The hatchery, which employs 30 staff, represents the pivotal commercialisation stage of one of the ARC’s most fruitful collaborations between researchers and industry. 

Two ARC research hubs at the University of Tasmania, first the ARC Research Hub for the Commercial Development of Lobster Culture Systems, and now the ARC Research Hub for Sustainable Onshore Lobster Aquaculture, have partnered with Ornatas, the company established to commercialise world first aquaculture technology. Together, they have positioned Australia as the world leader in sustainable onshore systems for lobster aquaculture. 

Dr Jennifer Blair is the Hatchery and Research and Development Manager with Ornatas. She says tropical rock lobsters are especially challenging for aquaculture (farming in water) for many reasons, including their long larval phase in the wild. 

“Those larvae way out in ocean currents, they're at relatively low density. They have very minimum food out there. It's complicated to recreate the conditions from those oceanic environments in an aquaculture situation to achieve commercially viable productivity,” Dr Blair says.

The rewards, though, are potentially significant. The Tropical Rock Lobster is highly regarded around the world as an exquisite and unique seafood. ‘It can fetch over $100 US per kilo,’ Dr Blair says. ‘The systems that we operate ... are very expensive compared to other hatchery production systems for aquaculture [but] it brings an opportunity, at the appropriate scale, to generate for our company a revenue of $160 million a year in turnover of product.’

The potential benefits of a successful lobster aquaculture industry extend well beyond Ornatas. The industry may eventually be worth $500 million a year and could generate up to 1000 Australian jobs across the supply chain by 2032.

This growing industry is thanks to a back-to-back, $10 million Australian Government investment in the two ARC Research Hubs, boosted by a further $33 million in cash and in-kind investment by Ornatas and other partners. Ornatas CEO Scott Parkinson has described the resulting technology as ‘truly the Holy Grail of aquaculture and does what so many have tried and failed at before – commercial production of Tropical Rock Lobster from egg, that will underpin production of premium lobsters to a marketable size on land using sustainable practices’. 

Together, the ARC Research Hub and Ornatas grapple with ongoing challenges. Among those are cannibalism - the tendency of juvenile lobsters to eat each other - and developing a formulated feed for the lobsters that can be produced at scale. Ornatas stays in close contact with the Research Hub’s 5 research teams, each with a special research focus, to track progress. 

“I'm interacting with them on a weekly basis around what research is happening,” Jennifer says. “It's even better when they can come and spend a bit of time with us and see what's happening in the commercial facility.”

Associate Professor Quinn Fitzgibbon is Deputy Director of the ARC Research Hub for Sustainable Onshore Aquaculture, University of Tasmania. Professor Fitzgibbon has worked in lobster research for many years, a familiarity obvious in the easy way he fishes an adult lobster out of a pond to show visiting ARC staff. He says it’s always a challenge to translate laboratory-based knowledge into a commercial reality. 

“The researchers need to be engaged in the industry at the commercial scale and they need to be joining the industry partners in solving their specific problems that might be related to their particular site, or the expansion of the technology into a commercial setting,” Professor Fitzgibbon says. 

“Industry is exposed to many different drivers, and often they're very different to the drivers that are impacting us as researchers. Change is inevitable, and as partners, you need to pivot and adapt.” 

The Research Hub continues to achieve the breakthroughs needed for commercial success. One of those breakthroughs was in formulating food for the lobsters, which, unlike fish, tend not to immediately descend on feed pellets in the water. 

“It means the pellets stay in the water a long time, losing their nutritional value and becoming less attractive to the lobsters,” Professor Fitzgibbon says. “We had to develop a novel formulation to combat this unusual behaviour, and I'm very proud to say that now we've developed an aqua feed that works even better than natural feeds. And that's an absolute world first.”

The Research Hub is also making progress on combating the cannibalism issue – stopping the lobsters from being eaten when they are made vulnerable while losing their shells as part of their growth cycle (moulting). Professor Fitzgibbon has led work on a multi-pronged technique, one of which is to try to develop innovative tank systems that separate the lobsters when they're vulnerable to being attacked by others. 

“The other major area was to really understand their social behaviours and try and work with the lobsters instead, to change their behaviour, to allow them to segregate and protect themselves when they’re vulnerable,” he says. 

Working together, Ornatas and the ARC Research Hubs have set Australia on the road to the world’s first onshore lobster aquaculture industry. Hundreds of jobs are expected to be generated by feed manufactures, onshore and sea raft grow-out, downstream processing, distribution, and marketing – mostly in Queensland. For Professor Fitzgibbon, it’s the highlight of a career studying lobsters.

“As a scientist, you want to see value and success from your research. In getting this opportunity to work in large projects and actually see that come to fruition, developing a new industry that supports jobs and makes income - it's absolutely exciting.

“Importantly, also, I see a great conservation benefit in being able to supply lobsters to market that are sustainably produced, and not harvested unsustainably from a dwindling wild resource.”