Shellfish hatcheries represent the tip of the pyramid for aquaculture, where a large and diverse market for shellfish production is serviced by a comparative few hatcheries

This is true across the U.S. Where twenty or so hatchery companies service thousands of shellfish companies. This scenario of large-scale hatchery production in relatively few places is precarious because failure of just one of these facilities can cause a significant deficit in seed production in the industry. The reason the industry has developed in this fashion is that, at least in part, shellfish hatcheries can be expensive to set up, requiring significant capital for procurement of suitable waterfront property, facility construction, facility equipment, and specialized staffing. After this significant investment, there is no guarantee of consistent production for stable return on investment due to numerous causes of culture failure including, but not limited to, harmful algal blooms, polluted upland runoff, pathogenic bacterial species, acidified water, and more. Furthermore, often these failures go UN-explained making preventing them in the future or adjusting filtration difficult. This paradigm restricts the entrance of new companies into the seed production business and limits diversity and redundancy in the market. This proposal offers an alternative to the current status QUO in U.S. Shellfish hatchery production by the development of a highly efficient mobile oyster hatchery (MOH) capable of commercially relevant seed production. By creating a relatively inexpensive and simple to operate mobile shellfish hatchery, hatchery production could become more decentralized, effectively reducing product shortages through redundancy while allowing more participation in the seed market, promoting diversification. The ultimate goal of the concept we are developing with this project is to disrupt the norms of shellfish hatchery production by commercializing spatially diverse and agile hatchery capacity. Our precept is that hatchery technology has advanced, and will advance, sufficiently that we can begin to think out of the (stationary) box on shellfish seed production. We believe this paradigm shift has the ability to stabilize the seed market ensuring success of the shellfish aquaculture industry and therefore durable consumer access to the most sustainable animal protein source on the planet - farm raised shellfish.