Animal husbandry – Aquatic animal culturing – Fish culturing
Patent
1996-10-28
1998-06-02
Carone, Michael J.
Animal husbandry
Aquatic animal culturing
Fish culturing
119237, A01K 6100
Patent
active
057586020
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention provides for a cage for growing abalone, or other suitable under water species, which includes a means for trapping drift weed to provide a ready and accessible source of food for the abalone or other species held within the cage, and includes the method for its construction.
In one form of farming under water animals, particularly marine fish or shell fish, the animals are maintained in cages or other means, which are secured to the bottom of the sea bed. The animals feed as they would in the wild by catching food that drifts by as a result of tidal movement and currents. From the farming perspective, this is relatively inefficient because the amount of food passing by, without supplementary feeding, is variable, as the tides and currents are variable, and hence much of it passes straight through the cage without being caught by the animals. This means that the numbers of animals that can be maintained in a cage, and their rates of growth are significantly less than optimal for the actual amount of food passing through the cage.
The object of the present invention is to provide a cage which essentially catches the food for the animals and concentrates it in such a way that they have ready access, at will, to as much food as possible at all times. As a result more animals can be maintained in a given cage and growth rates are improved.
Attempts to do this in the past have had limited success because food that is brought in with one tide is easily washed out again when the tide reverses. It is a further object of the invention to prevent loss of captured food when tides or currents change direction, and further, to maximize the efficiency of the food collection by the invention by collecting food from the water moving in both forward and reverse directions.
It is still a further object of the invention to present the collected and concentrated food to the captive animals is the most accessible and efficient way possible.
An additional advantage of the present invention is that algae will grow on the mesh and captured drift weed or other food material and the algae form a further source of nutrition.
The present invention provides for a cage for holding abalone or other suitable under water species, constructed mainly from stiff mesh of plastic or metal or other suitable material, with a ballast means capable of holding the cage steady in flowing water, constructed so that a large surface area of mesh is presented to the flow of water through the cage to provide sieving of drift weed or similar plant or other material from the flowing water and to allow capture and concentration of the drift weed or other material by the cage so that the animals within the cage can feed on the drift weed or plant material.
The ballast means can be in the form of a concrete base to the cage or can be attached to it by lines.
In order to present the maximum possible surface area to the flowing water, the cage may be of a variety of different shapes including butterfly wing, multi-lobe, star or oblong.
In a preferred embodiment of the invention the walls of the cage are formed into collection chambers for collecting drift weed or other food suitable for the animals in the cage to feed upon.
In one form the openings to the chambers can be formed in a V-shape to maximize funnelling of material into it.
The chambers can be more or less U-shaped with the funnel opening to the outside at one end and closed at the other, so that food captured from water flowing into the chamber is not all lost by being washed out when the flow of water is reversed such as when the tides change.
The cage may have attached to the top of it an upper chamber of similar mesh, access to which is available through suitable holes in the top of the cage. The abalone or other species in the cage can move into the upper chamber which provides an additional surface area of mesh from the walls of the chamber through which the abalone or other species can graze or feed on the drift weed or other material captured in the chambers.
The concrete base m
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Abbott Yvonne R.
Carone Michael J.
Schindler Edwin D.
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