It has a soft body surrounded by a mantle, an anterior head and a large muscular foot. Mollusks are best known for their beautifully formed and colored calcareous shell secreted by the mantle.
Abalone farming can be a way of livelihood for people seeking profit. All it takes is to have the ideal marine environment for them to produce and sell it.
Tinian incumbent Mayor Jose P. San Nicolas along with some of the island’s agricultural officials and representatives traveled to Tigbauan, Iloilo in the Philippines for specialized training on abalone nursery and grow-out culture and seaweed farming. The week-long training was held at the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center Aquaculture Department.
Representatives from different fields of aquaculture trained the CNMI participants in the following fields: hatchery, nursery, and grow-out of the tropical abalone; seaweed farming, hatchery operation: egg collection, counting, incubation, monitoring of larval development; harvest, counting of veliger larvae for stocking, post larval rearing, preparation of diatom slurry and feeding; financial feasibility and market potential, sorting and packing of abalone juveniles for transport, stocking and feeding of juveniles in cages, sampling of abalone in grow-out cages, as well as monitoring and feeding of abalone cages.
Through their visit to the country they learned that Tinian’s sea water environment is conducive to farming abalones and that this can help the people in the community.
A portion of the island seaport is used for the project. The location selected was in the area of the seaport where freshwater and saltwater combine, an ideal abalone habitat. “The project started April of this year,”says Edwin Cabrera, abalone farm supervisor.
They brought in 5,000 abalones from Iloilo to start farming. But because there were concerns with oxygen and water during the handling of the abalones when it was flown to Tinian, only 3,200 of the mollusks were in good condition to be transferred to the seaport.
One hundred abalones are housed in five-compartment cages that are joined together. In each cage are seaweeds abalones feed on every three days. There are 150 cages set in the sea. These are protected by nets so that marine predators such as crabs, lobsters, and other nocturnal animals will not prey on them.
They expect to harvest in January of 2010 “We expect around 100,000 to 2,000 abalones. The project is focused on spawning,” Cabrera said. After the harvest they will teach the technology to the people in the community for them to start their own abalone farms.
