Aquaculture
Egg to plate
Giant Grouper is protected in Australia – and that’s the way it should be. Years of overfishing throughout the world has reduced the breeding population forcing the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN) to list the species as vulnerable.
Every few years, The Company One, collects a limited number of wild specimens from North Queensland waters and carefully transports them back to the breeding facility in Cairns where they are introduced as broodstock. What happens next is a delicate process:
Stage one
Once spawned from the broodstock, the eggs float to the top of the tank and are collected, sorted for quality, and taken to the hatchery. Twenty-four hours later the little grouper’s hatch as larvae.
Stage two
They remain in the larval stage for approximately 40 days and are fed a diet of mainly live food to match to their nutritional requirements before being weaned onto formulated diets as they transition to become fingerlings.
Stage three
The fingerlings are then graded to minimise cannibalism and transferred to the nursery where they stay for approximately two to four weeks depending on the sizing requirements of the farms.
Stage four
Finally, the young fish are packed and transported internationally and domestically to grow-out facilities where they mature to market size.
Our facilities
Broodstock
The broodstock facilities are located in a specially controlled environment that allows the broodstock to spawn naturally every month. The Grouper broodstock spawn in excess of 300 million eggs per annum.
Live feed
Our intensive live feed facility cultures copepods, rotifers and artemia which are the high nutritional value live feed that the fish larvae consume and digest. The Company One is unique in Australia by mass culturing copepods as a primary live feed. The technological advances achieved within the centre are resulting in significant increases to larval survival, vigour and growth rates.
Hatchery
The controlled hatchery environment supports consistent fingerling production. The larval cycle from egg to fingerling takes 35 – 45 days. Fingerlings are weaned onto pellet food around day 35 and transferred to the nursery when they reach 20mm – 25mm.
Nursery
The specialised recirculating aquaculture system enhances fingerling growth. Fingerlings stay in the Nursery for 14 days (50mm) to 35 days (100mm) ready for transfer to grow-out facilities.