Specifically, shrimp! In recent years, farming within the shrimp industry has become tough. Shrimp is selling at incredibly low prices, yet the cost of feeding and raising the animal is high. Not only that, many farmers' stocks are susceptible to disease, which can result in devastating financial losses. This article goes into how the company, the Center for Aquatic Technologies (CAT), helps farmers improve their shrimp stocks. CAT provides genotyping services that can allow farmers to select for traits better for breeding their shrimp. Traits that could make the shrimp more disease resistant and grow better. CAT uses panels for genotyping, which is a collection of genes that can be tested for mutations, diseases, etc. Back in 2019, CAT developed a high-density panel for shrimp genotyping that can help farmers all around the world.
One thing that fascinated me about this article was the fact that a company like CAT even exists in the first place. It just would have never occurred to me that there was a niche to be filled in genotyping shrimps in order to produce better seafood stocks. Of course, humans have been breeding bigger, better, tastier plants and animals for thousands of years now. but the realm of shrimp farming was so obscure to me that it was interesting to see such a complex technology be applied to something so specific. In the article, one of the people working for CAT mentions how farmers can't just rely on genetics and breeding alone. Good animal husbandry practices must be done as well, and as someone who has kept and bred my own population of shrimp before, I couldn't agree more with that statement. Although, pet cherry shrimp aren't exactly the same as the food shrimp discussed in the article, such monodon and vannamei shrimp.
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