Jamestown Seafoods & Pacific Hybreed: Advancing Shellfish Aquaculture at HOST Park

Nathan Tsao
General Manager - Jamestown Seafoods

My whole life was fishing, fishing, fishing, all growing up. And I ended up going to college for fisheries biology and and aquaculture. At the time I was getting out of college, nobody in fisheries was hiring, so I said, I'll give commercial aquaculture a try. Ended up here in Kona by accident on my way to Alaska. Learned how to surf, started catching ulua's, and never left. So my name's Nathan Tsao. We're here at the HOST Park in NELHA. This is an oyster hatchery. So this place is majority owned by the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe. They're a federally recognized Native American tribe based out of Sequim, Washington. I'm a small percentage owner of the business, and I've been growing oysters and fish and all kinds of ocean critters down here for the past 21 years. What we do here at the JPWB hatchery is we take adult oysters, spawn them to make lots of little tiny babies, and we grow roughly 50-60 million of these babies oysters here in Kona to ship to the mainland US per year.

Melissa Dellatorre
CEO - Pacific Hybreed

So, out of a single female oyster that can have about 60 million eggs, less than 1% of that will make it through metamorphosis into the wild and grow up to be an oyster that people can eat. The oysters take about 36 hours to create their shell, and from then on, for the first three to four weeks, they're a free-swimming plankton in the ocean. Um, in the hatchery conditions, we're able to minimize losses because there's no drift factors. We know we're keeping them at stable environmental conditions. But also, over 99% of oysters are genetically inviable. It's very rare for a fertilized egg to develop into a full-grown oyster.

Nathan Tsao

For food security, the shellfish breeding programs here at NELHA really serve a massive percentage of the shellfish grown on the West Coast of the US. So here for commercial hatcheries, we have here at the Jamestown hatchery, right next door is Taylor Shellfish, they're probably the biggest hatchery on the West Coast. Pacific Hybreed, the R&D genetics program, and then we also have Pacific Seafoods who has a hatchery here. That all combined probably produces upwards of 75 to 80% of all the shellfish that's grown on the West Coast, come through Kona and NELHA at some some point in time.

Melissa Dellatorre

We're looking for genotypes that do really well in warm water conditions and finding the genotypes that do really well with ocean acidification and the genotypes that are resilient to different types of diseases to allow farms to be able to produce more seed, to help the stock of of oysters and shellfish.

Nathan Tsao

The big reason why shellfish production here at NELHA is such a big deal is because we have access to unlimited sunlight to growing our microalgae that you can see behind me. We have access to deep sea water, which is, you don't get that anywhere else in the world. It's really nutrient-dense seawater that we can use 24/7. Surface seawater for our, you know, our warm temperatures, and it gives us a growing platform that we can operate 365 days a year, which is so special. Uh, nowhere else in the world has that availability.

So, NELHA has an R&D section of the campus, and one of the advantages that we have being in the commercial development park is that just so happens inside their R&D campus is another shellfish genetics breeding program called Pacific Hybreed. Uh, I speak with them almost daily, and it's a huge benefit to have someone come in and do the, you know, the genetic line, the broodstock research that me as a private company, we don't necessarily have those resources. But them as a fellow tenant, we can share ideas and information constantly. It's a really open forum of communication within the park.

This business of the shellfish hatchery was a vision of a man named Kurt Grinnell, who was a tribal council for the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe. Uh, he had passed away unexpectedly a few years ago, but this was his vision to bring sustainable aquaculture to the Jamestown Tribe. And Kurt's vision was to really bring aquaculture to the forefront of Jamestown Tribe and have it a point of pride. So this is more than just a business, it's also a tribal identity, and it's an honor to carry that out. Jamestown Tribe doesn't do anything in the short term. Jamestown Tribe thinks in seven generations. So my role here building this hatchery out in Jamestown's vision is to have a successful shellfish hatchery program, you know, 150, 200 years into the future, and I'm just a small part of that at the moment.

One of the most special aspects of NELHA in my view is the really strong sense of community that we have down here, you know, amongst all the aquaculturists. Uh, we all know each other, work together, our kids go to school together, we see each other at lunch every day, and nowhere else in the world are you going to get this really open sharing community of of working problems and solutions, and that that's such a special, special benefit of working here at HOST Park.

Melissa Dellatorre

Having the camaraderie and support of the other farms, uh, in the area and then also the team at NELHA, uh, has been really valuable to us. Uh, the NELHA staff has, we're super grateful for them. Um, they've really go above and beyond to maintain our seawater system, um, minimize disruptions, and also, um, in supporting us to make sure that our companies are set up for success.

Nathan Tsao

We just want to be the best. That's really, that's really what it is for us. The best in product, the best in service. I love this place. It's, like I said earlier, it's one of one. There's probably never going to be another one. And this place is so special that I want to put all my effort into constantly improving this place because, uh, us as a community, not just the shellfish growers, but all of the tenants here, we have so much aloha for this place that we just, we pour ourselves into it. And that's unexpected. I'd never, never in a million years would have thought I'd be saying that on camera.

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