Despite Suit, Aquaculture Experiment Will Proceed

     Despite an attempt by a consumer advocacy group to delay an aquaculture project in Buzzards Bay, yesterday researchers from the Marine Biological Laboratory released thousands of black sea bass into an underwater container called an aquadome.
     They have worked for nearly a year to train the bass to know when they are going to be fed by emitting a 280-hertz signal. The fish will continue to be fed at the sound of the tone for two to four weeks while they are in the aquadome, and will then be released into the open water, where researchers will emit the signal irregularly and the fish that return to the area will be rewarded with food.
     The project is aimed at finding a way to revive a dwindling bass population, but the group that filed an injunction to delay the research, Washington, DC-based Food and Water Watch Inc., is claiming that it would be detrimental to the fish and their habitat.
     They have requested that a federal judge revoke the permit issued by the United States Army Corps of Engineers for the installation of the aquadome because of an incomplete review process.
     The group filed suit against the Army Corps last week, and a hearing was held in Boston Monday, said Gina Hebert, associate director of communications at MBL.
     The judge gave the project “full approval” to continue, but if a violation is found during the review process in the coming weeks, it could be halted, Ms. Hebert said.
     According to court documents, the suit claims that the Army Corps’ determination that the project has no significant impact failed to “take the required hard look at the potential environmental harms of the project.”
     It calls the review conducted “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion,” and a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.
     The groups asserts that the aquadome would cause “irreparable damage” to the water quality of Buzzards Bay and its wild fish and bird populations by altering the chemical composition of the sediment by accumulating matter harmful to juvenile fish.
     “Delay in addressing this matter will allow the environmental injuries from the MBL project to begin,” the suit states.
     However, Scott R. Lindell, director of the scientific aquaculture program at MBL and the leader of the project, called the group’s claim that the project would cause irreparable harm “pretty absurd.”
     He said that the Army Corps permitting process was “a high bar to pass through,” involving a review by at least six state and federal agencies and lasting from February to June.
     In response to concerns that the groups raised that excess feed released into the water would “disrupt the natural ecosystem,” Dr. Lindell said that researchers will monitor the fish with a camera mounted in the cage and will adjust the amount of food released as necessary. “We’re not just dumping food in and hoping that the fish eat it,” he said.
     He said that the bass raised by researchers are “genetically indistinguishable from their wild counterparts,” and that other than their response to the feeding signal their behavior will not differ. “The project is designed to demonstrate a novel way to allow recovery of depleted species, not jeopardize them,” he said.
     Funded by a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the project looks into whether the process of training fish to respond to a signal, called acoustic ranching, can help improve the sharply declining black sea bass population.
     The grant proposal for the project states that more than 60 percent of seafood in the United States is imported, and, while the demand for seafood is rising, harvests are either stable or declining.
     By training fish to respond to a signal and monitoring whether they continue to return for food after they are released, researchers will learn whether the technique could be used to bolster the local bass population, project research assistant Simon V. Miner explained in March.
     Unlike traditional fish farming, which packs fish in a small enclosure while they mature to market size and can be detrimental because of increased disease and large amount of waste, Mr. Miner said the proposed project does not have the same negative effects because the fish are released into the open water after a few weeks.
     The aquadome is an open structure that contains fish in a barrier of wire mesh. It was installed on the seafloor at a depth of 35 feet near the Weepeckets, small islands just north of Naushon Island in Buzzards Bay.