Fish Farm Idea Floated For Ocean Off South Fork

As striped bass numbers on the East Coast continue to decline, and more stringent restrictions are placed on their harvest by fishermen, an East Quogue entrepreneur has presented state officials with a proposal for an oceanic fish farm in which striped bass, and other species, would be raised in large floating cages off the South Fork.

Manna Fish Farms Inc., the brainchild of East Quogue attorney Donna Lanzetta, has pitched a state business incubator the idea of mooring as many as two dozen mesh-enclosed galvanized steel geodesic pods in the Atlantic Ocean, about three miles off the coast, where hundreds of thousands of striped bass could be raised and sold to seafood purveyors without any depletion of the wild population.

Ms. Lanzetta, who is the president of the East Quogue Chamber of Commerce, has billed the idea as an environmentally sustainable form of seafood production. The fish in the cages would be the brood of wild fish, but would not come from the wild population and would be fed with an organic food mixture that, she notes, is still being conceived.

“It would be a sustainable seafood source of the type the world is going to need going into the future,” Ms. Lanzetta said this week. “We want to explore new components [to feed the caged fish], like algae, organic proteins, like mushrooms. We want a non-genetically modified, organic, sustainable produced product.”

The fish would be placed in the cages as small adults and allowed to grow, protected from wild and human predators, until they reach a size suitable for use as seafood. The cages would remain in the water year-round.

Fish farms based in the open ocean have been billed as a more environmentally sensitive option to traditional fish farms near the shore or on land, which have been blamed for increasing water pollution and spreading diseases to wild fish. The first open ocean fish farm in the United States opened last year off the coast of Hawaii.

“Ocean cages, at least from the research conducted, are much lower impact than coastal cages,” said Dr. Konstantine Rountos, a marine ecologist at Stony Brook University who has worked on the Manna Fish Farm plans with Ms. Lanzetta. “You are in increased depths, so any [waste] effluent from the fish gets dispersed in a much larger volume of water. Nutrients are assimilated and absorbed into the food web, rather than just settling onto the bottom.”

Species grown in open ocean cages, however, will likely require a more robust diet of protein and Dr. Rountos said it is important to the sustainability principle to ensure that there is not a net reduction to the marine environment caused by the creation of the special food for the farmed fish.

At the outset, Manna Fish Farm would get its first generation of juvenile striped bass from Multi-Aquaculture, a land-based fish farm in Amagansett, Ms. Lanzetta said. But, ultimately, the program would likely rely on its own spawning of baby striped bass.

The geodesic cages, known as “Aquapods,” are more than 200 feet across, and could each hold between 14,000 and 28,000 fish, depending on what size they are grown to. “In Hawaii, the pods have actually added life to the ocean,” Ms. Lanzetta said. “They act like a floating coral reef—they become their own little ecosystem.”

The “food” for the fish would be held in a buoy attached to the cage and released automatically at a predetermined rate to fatten the fish.

The logistics and economics of the project pose substantial hurdles. The cages themselves cost some $250,000 each. They have to be moored in about 120 feet of water and secured so they sit about 60 feet below the surface. The food, whatever its ultimate composition, has to be produced and supplied to the fish.

The project is in its earliest phase of proposal, but Ms. Lanzetta hopes that with the blessing of state and federal regulators, tax benefits from business incubator Start Up New York, and a substantial base of private funding that she says is already in place, the first fish pods of Manna Fish Farm could be in the Atlantic by the summer of 2016.