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June 11, 2004
BLUE CRAB RESEARCH GETS FISCAL BOOST FROM PHILLIPS FOODS, INC.
BALTIMORE, MD -- Representatives from Phillips Foods, Inc. presented the Maryland Watermen’s Association’s Chesapeake Bay Environmental Planners (CBEP) with a $100,000 donation at a ceremony held at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute’s (UMBI) Columbus Center facility on Thursday, June 10, 2004. The donation will support development of “grow out” nurseries to receive juvenile crabs from ongoing hatchery efforts of UMBI’s Center of Marine Biotechnology (COMB) and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC).
Joanna Phillips presents donation to CBEP partners to facilitate COMB's large scale blue crab juvenile production effort (from left to right: William (Pete) Jensen, Deputy Secretary DNR; Yonathan Zohar, Director of COMB; Mick Blackistone, Executive Director CBEP; Captain Bob Evans, Chairman, CBEP; Larry Simns, President, Maryland Watermen's Association; Joanna Phillips, Phillips Foods).
The $100,000 donation was presented by Joanna Phillips, daughter of Steve Phillips, to the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Planners and COMB to further the research and development of the crab hatchery/nursery program. Part of the donation will provide two scientists from Indonesia who have first hand experience in crab aquaculture to assist with the COMB scaling-up effort.
So far, over 100,000 juvenile blue crabs were produced at the COMB pilot hatchery facilities. Around 44,000 of the baby crabs were individually tagged and experimentally released into the Chesapeake Bay. SERC scientists then monitored the crabs in the Bay for periods of up to one year after their release, obtaining promising results in terms of the potential contribution of the released crabs to the blue crab breeding stocks.
“To date, this has been the world’s largest tag, release and monitor experiment done for any species of crab,” said Dr. Yonathan Zohar, Director of COMB and head of the integrated blue crab research program. “However, in order to determine the feasibility of using hatchery produced crabs to help restore the Bay blue crab, we need to release many more juveniles both in Maryland and Virginia. We are now at a stage in our research where we can produce the hundreds of thousands of juvenile crabs needed for the remaining critical release experiments. The only limit has been tank or grow out nursery space,” Zohar said. “We are thus ready to work with the watermen and DNR in scaling up our production so we can release larger numbers of hatchery crabs and monitor their survival, migration patterns and impact on abundance of the dwindling blue crab breeding stocks.”
UMBI President Dr. Jennie Hunter-Cevera also noted the significance of the donation. “This event and the donations by Phillips and the watermen’s CBEP, marks a significant milestone for COMB researchers and their collaborators who have worked so diligently over the past three and a half years from spawning and hatching blue crabs out of season and in captivity to designing a hatchery for blue crab production,” said Hunter-Cevera. “The synergistic partnership between the watermen and academic researchers has successfully integrated indigenous knowledge with the modern tools of biotechnology and aquaculture. This is quite an achievement and I am very proud of Dr. Zohar and his team for their perseverance and dedication to this project of enhancing blue crabs in the Chesapeake ecosystem.”
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The University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute was mandated by the state of Maryland legislature in 1985 as "a new paradigm of state economic development in biotech-related sciences." With five major research and education centers across Maryland, UMBI is dedicated to advancing the frontiers of biotechnology. The centers are the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology in Rockville; Center for Biosystems Research in College Park; and Center of Marine Biotechnology, Medical Biotechnology Center, and the Institute of Human Virology, all in Baltimore.
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