Lee Brothers checks one of the 45 ponds in Aurora where he grows hybrid striped bass. 

 He got his start applying years of Sea Grant research to commercial production. 



Cultivating a Different 

 Kind of Crop 



T. 



welve years ago, people around 

 Aurora laughed when Lee Brothers 

 began to farm water instead of land. 



They thought it was the most 

 ridiculous thing they had ever heard of 

 when Lee's father, Harvey Brothers, dug 

 three ponds out of perfectly good land 

 and Lee prepared to put eight years of 

 Sea Grant research to a commercial test. 



They're not laughing anymore. Now 

 some of those same people are asking 

 Lee Brothers to sell them young hybrid 

 striped bass fingerlings and to teach them 

 how to raise this cross between striped 

 bass and white bass. Brothers was the 

 first in the country to commercially 

 pond-raise the fish, which is hardier and 

 faster-growing than its parents and now 

 makes state growers about $3.5 million 

 a year. 



The hybrid striped bass industry 

 has come a long way since its unsure 

 beginning. Production has increased 

 every year since the first crop was sold 



in 1988-89. And the state has more than 

 25 licensed farms, including two that sell 

 fingerlings. 



Coming along later, the new fish 

 fanners get to take advantage of years of 

 research and experience focused on 

 pond-raised hybrid striped bass. They 

 also reap the benefits of the cooperative 

 relationship that developed among 

 Brothers, Sea Grant and a program 

 called the National Coastal Resources 

 Research and Development Institute 

 (NCRI), which helps put research results 

 to work in private enterprise and allowed 

 Brothers to launch his experiment. 



The scientists developed informa- 

 tion about how to raise the fish commer- 

 cially through years of research. Then, 

 through practical trial and error. Brothers 

 modified their findings for commercial 

 production and learned how to handle 

 the kinds of problems that hybrid striped 

 bass farmers encounter, such as pests 

 and low oxygen levels in the water. 



In the last decade, Ron Hodson, 

 director of North Carolina Sea Grant, 

 and Craig Sullivan, an associate 

 professor of zoology at NC State, have 

 made advances in hybrid striped bass 

 reproduction. The two developed 

 hormone pellets that can be implanted in 

 the fish to gain more control of its 

 reproductive cycle and to make finger- 

 ling production more reliable. 



Just this year, Sullivan and other 

 researchers at NC State successfully 

 spawned domestic broodstock, a 

 significant step because broodstock now 

 has to be caught in the wild every 

 spring. When this effort is completed 

 one day, the fish can be spawned year- 

 round — without worries about 

 fluctuations in nature year to year — 

 and they can be bred to encourage 

 particular genetic traits. 



"In most cases research takes a long 

 time, and obviously there is always 

 something else to learn and discover," 

 says Hodson, who has been instrumental 

 in conducting the research and develop- 

 ing the technology used to establish the 

 pond culture of hybrid striped bass. 

 "Distinct benefits sometimes take a long 

 time to develop." 



Brothers' business, Carolina Fisher- 

 ies, has been a good laboratory. In the 

 beginning, he agreed to trade three years 

 of information about commercial pond 

 production for one year of fish and feed 

 bought with a grant from NCRI. These 

 days, he sells about 1 million pounds of 

 food fish a year from Carolina Fisheries 

 and surrounding farms, and he sells fin- 

 gerlings as far away as Taiwan. Now, 

 instead of three ponds, he has 45 cover- 

 ing 160 acres. 



Although Brothers experiments on 

 his own and keeps some of his findings 

 proprietary, he continues to cooperate 

 with researchers more than a decade 

 after he started. 



"Every year we learn something 

 down here that helps," he says. 



Take the sale of fingerlings, which 

 Brothers has been producing for seven 

 years. The national average for survival 

 is about 25 percent. Carolina Fisheries' 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 19 



