Facilities
Facilities
The specialist aquaculture infrastructure at Shetland UHI are our two production resources – the marine farm ‘Lea of Trondra’ and our onshore tank facility ‘Marine Hatchery’. Over the last twenty years these have proven to be an excellent platform for aquaculture knowledge exchange and innovation projects as well as serving needs of other disciplines including life sciences and engineering applications. Both locations are licenced for the cultivation of various finfish, shellfish, microalgal and macroalgal species.
The Marine Hatchery has a variety of seawater cultivation systems and options for replicated trials units that are suitable for investigations of proof-of-concept through to full research programmes. Cultivation facilities at the Marine Hatchery include microalgae production (batch and continuous), zooplankton production, broodstock husbandry and spawning, larviculture and on-growing. Tankage includes 6 x 21 m3 and 16 x 3 m3, 4 x 10 m3 outdoor tanks and tank rooms with wet areas reconfigurable to suit various needs. The cultivation facilities are backed up with engineering systems for seawater filtration, disinfection and temperature control and trials can be scaled from small replicated up to semi-commercial levels.
These two aquaculture-specific facilities are supported further by office and teaching facilities in the John Goodlad Centre, along with research laboratory facilities there including microbiology, microscopy, and histology. The department also has access to environmental survey and monitoring equipment such as CTD, side scan sonar and an Imaging Flow CytoBot.
The aquaculture team at Shetland UHI have been proud to work recently with aquaculture producers and supply-chain companies that are active in Shetland. These companies include Grieg Seafood Shetland Ltd., Scottish Sea Farms Ltd., Cooke Aquaculture Ltd., Seafood Shetland, Shetland Mussels Ltd., Li6 Ltd., East Voe Shellfish Ltd., Ocean Kinetics Ltd., AquaShip Ltd., etc. We also work collaboratively with national and international partners.