For generations, oyster farming has provided significant social and economic value in coastal communities

More recently, there is growing awareness of its environmental value. Farmed oysters require minimal energy and feed, filter a significant volume of water, and remove carbon and nutrients from the sea at harvest. At the same time, growers face increasingly urgent threats from environmental change and stressors, directly or indirectly attributable to climate change, that will likely become more significant in the future. These environmental stressors create the potential for significant reductions in shellfish yields in the years ahead. Breeding programs can improve yields of oysters, especially in regions such as the U.S. West coast where growers reply on hatchery-produced seed. The primary goal of this sbir project for pacific hybreed, INC. Is to increase production of farmed pacific oysters through crossbreeding.crossbreeding to produce within-species hybrid lines has provided massive improvements to yields for corn and other land crops. This project, focused on the pacific oyster, the largest crop for the shellfish industry on the U.S. West coast (from california to alaska) will support the development of hybrid oysters. Published research shows that hybrids can have significantly higher yields. Research efforts have been proposed to utilize crossbreeding and produce distinct hybrid lines optimized for specific growing conditions in different geographies and ocean conditions, now and as they change in the future. The project includes critical field testing of many different genetic lines developed for the project, in multiple locations, to find the correlation among higher performances, specific genetics and local environmental conditions.