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| Lobby of the Aquaculture Research Station's research laboratory and office building. |
Aquaculture faculty have teaching appointments in School of Renewable Natural Resources and research appointments in the Aquaculture Research Station. They are are housed at the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center's Aquaculture Research Station, about 3 miles from the LSU main campus. This 186-acre facility is one of the largest in the United States. The station has 140 experimental earthen ponds ranging in size from 0.02 to 19.0 acres and totaling 100 surface water acres, more than 200 outdoor fiberglass pools, a fish hatchery, a greenhouse, fish holding facility, and a 22,000-square-foot laboratory and office building. In addition to research activities at the station, aquaculture and seafood research is conducted on campus in the departments of Food Science, Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness, Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Veterinary Science. Other administrative units active in aquaculture research include the Louisiana Sea Grant College, School of Veterinary Medicine and the Rice Research Station in Crowley.
The School of Veterinary Medicine operates an Aquatic Pathology Laboratory, a 4,000-square-foot facility with nine wet labs and two dry labs, for research in aquatic animal diseases and aquatic toxicology. Cooperative research in marine aquaculture is conducted at facilities operated by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON). In addition, outfield research is conducted at facilities operated by commercial aquacultural producers.
The scope of aquacultural research ranges from pond production to molecular biology. Research ponds at the Aquaculture Research Station and the Rice Research Station are used to develop experimental culture practices that are subsequently evaluated at commercial aquaculture facilities. Laboratory facilities at the station provide researchers with the means to study genetics, water quality, nutrition, feed development, facility design and processing quality control. The Louisiana Aquatic Diagnostic Laboratory in the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine (LSU-ADL) is available to support research projects and provide expertise in clinical fish disease diagnosis. The LSU-ADL, the only full-service diagnostic laboratory in Louisiana, receives more than 500 aquatic disease cases annually from a variety of public, private and commercial sources. Aquacultural research is directed toward:
- Management techniques for increasing crawfish production
- Multiple cropping of crawfish and grain crops
- Polyculture of catfish and other organisms
- Integrated aquaculture and agricultural systems
- Water quality and effluent management in aquaculture
- Aquacultural engineering and process control technologies
- Nutritional requirements of commercially important aquatic species
- Feed and bait development for fishes and crawfish
- Control of catfish diseases by immunization
- Pathogenesis of microbial fish diseases
- Genetic improvement of commercially important aquatic organisms
- Development of hatchery techniques
- Intensive culture in recirculating systems
- Reproductive control of cultured organisms
- Marine finfish aquaculture
- Catfish production systems
- Cryopreservation of gametes and embryos
- Molecular genetics and biotechnology
- Reproduction of endangered species
- Oyster aquaculture and genetic improvement