Partnering for premium abalone

A partnership that combines research and commercial expertise is developing a premium line of Australian abalone.

19 December 2007 | Updated 14 October 2011

Competitive advantage
Vibrant, tender and healthy
Abalone families established
CSIRO research partners

Efficient production of high-quality abalone for export markets is the goal of a research partnership between the Food Futures Flagship and Victorian aquaculture enterprise Great Southern Waters Ltd (GSW).

The partnership combines CSIRO’s world-renowned research in animal and plant breeding and food science with one of Australia’s leading producers of temperate abalone.

Competitive advantage

GSW operates from a ten-hectare aquaculture farm on Victoria’s Bellerine Peninsula, producing more than 150 tonnes of abalone a year, mainly for export markets in Japan and China.

The company is co-investing in selective breeding and associated technologies to develop premium lines of abalone that will have a competitive advantage on the international market.

The partnership recognises the cumulative and long-term improvements that selective breeding can provide.

Vibrant, tender and healthy

The ultimate goal for GSW is to produce a unique ‘Jade Tiger’ line with distinctive shell and meat characteristics tailored for the variety of products favoured by Chinese and Japanese clients.

They also want to improve abalone survival, and uniformity of growth rates and quality.

Several hundred offspring from each family are individually tagged and their growout performance is monitored, measured and analysed.

Export markets are seeking high-quality abalone in a variety of product forms including live, frozen (whole in shell, or meat), vacuum packed and canned.

These diverse market needs, coupled with the relatively recent domestication of the abalone species, presents many commercial and research challenges.

Chief among them is the need to combine desired characteristics from each of the two pure abalone species into the optimum Jade Tiger abalone.

The first commercial use of selected broodstock with Jade Tiger characteristics was made in 2007.

Abalone families established

Selective breeding requires individuals of known parentage to be performance-tested under controlled conditions.

The first Jade Tiger ‘tester’ population under the partnership was established in 2006, building on foundation breeding work begun by GSW in 2003.

For the next four years, a minimum of 50 families will be produced each year to address research questions and build the GSW selective breeding population.

These will be a combination of greenlip (Haliotis laevigata) and blacklip (H. rubra) families.

Several hundred offspring from each family are individually tagged and their growout performance is monitored, measured and analysed.

Elite performers in the GSW breeding population will be selected based on their estimated breeding value (EBV) for the Jade Tiger characteristics and used for commercial production.

Tissue samples are taken from all GSW broodstock and a DNA database is being established to allow the unique pedigree of all GSW abalone families to be traced.