FOOD FISH OF TOMORROW 



IENTISTS BOOST HYBRID INDUSTRY 

 WITH NEW DISCOVERIES 



By Kathy Hart 



They're a scientific odd couple. 



First, there's Craig Sullivan, the 

 Felix Unger sort, a zoologist at N.C. 

 State University specializing in fish 

 reproduction. 



He's fastidiously neat, well- 

 organized and intense; he waves charts 

 and graphs around like flags at a 

 Fourth of July parade. 



Speaking with a slight Boston 

 accent and dressed with the care of a 

 man concerned about his appearance, 

 Sullivan seriously calls himself a "fish 

 gynecologist" and talks about the 

 reproductive cycles of striped bass 

 with the kind of passion some men 

 reserve for sports teams and fast cars. 



Then there's Ron Hodson, the 

 Oscar Madison type, an aquaculture 

 specialist and associate director of 

 UNC Sea Grant. 



Hodson is kind of gruff, never 

 minces words and dresses like the farm 

 boy he once was. And, the 6-foot-3 

 researcher is just about as at home in a 

 pond of fish as the fish themselves. 



Put Sullivan and Hodson together, 

 and you have a top-notch scientific 

 team that knows as much about the life 

 cycles and characteristics of striped 

 bass, white bass and their mixed 

 offspring, the hybrid, as they know 

 about their own families. 



From the beginning of their 

 scientific partnership in 1988, Hodson 

 and Sullivan were determined to 

 ensure the development and growth of 

 a hybrid bass aquaculture industry. 



They wanted to spur farmers to 

 forsake the plow for the pond and 

 place the hybrid alongside catfish and 

 trout in acres of U.S. production. 



To do that, the Sea Grant team 

 needed to domesticate a parental stock 

 of fish, called broodstock, to assure a 

 ready supply of larvae and fingerlings. 

 And the researchers wanted to gain 



But first the Sea Grant scientists 

 had to solve some problems. 



Hybrid bass have been around 

 for years. South Carolina researchers 

 learned that fertilizing striped bass 

 eggs with white bass sperm produced 

 a hybrid bass that grew faster and 

 was more disease-resistant and 

 hardier than either of its parents. 



Researchers fertilize eggs with sperm. 



control over the reproductive cycle of 

 the fish in hopes of spawning them 

 more than once a year. 



If those two objectives could be 

 met, then raising hybrid bass could 

 become "as routine as raising broiler 

 chickens," Sullivan says. 



Scoit D. Taylor 



Scientists hoped the hybrid would 

 fill the void and the space on the 

 menu left by drastic reductions of 

 wild populations of striped bass, 

 or rockfish as they are called by 

 fishermen. 



Scientists took the first steps 



14 MAY I JUNE 1993 



