British Virgin Islands Spiny Lobster Farm Venulum, a private wealth management company based in the British Virgin Islands, has successfully managed to collect wild spiny lobster juveniles in commercial quantities. Giles Cadman, chairman of Venulum, said it took two years to perfect the collection process. He thinks the company will be capable of replicating it in the Caribbean, Australia and Asia. Cadman said, “The numbers are very impressive, indicating that settlement is spatially uniform and that collection systems perform equally well at depth as on the surface,” so the entire collection process could be done underwater and away from boat traffic. Experimental storage systems have been deployed in favorable, deep locations in the hope that they will be useful for holding juveniles while the farm infrastructure is completed. If effective, Venulum hopes the storage system will reduce the cost and duration of farming operations. A lobster farm has been built on the island

Durwood Dugger on Spiny Lobster Farming On February 1, 2007, I interviewed Durwood Dugger, a shrimp farming consultant and one of the pioneers of shrimp farming in the Western Hemisphere. Durwood, 60, has worked on more than 50 shrimp farming projects in the Western Hemisphere and has recently taken a very serious look at the economics of lobster farming. Shrimp News: What are your plans for lobster farming? Durwood Dugger: We've been looking at warmwater spiny lobster farming for several years now. We looked at what I call the Shrimp Farming Development Model and saw that the first real technical leap that we had in shrimp farming was selecting the most naturally adapted species (Penaeus vannamei) for aquaculture production. This critical task has not been accomplished with spiny lobster. Spiny lobster farming is where shrimp farming was in 1965. There are no broadly demonstrated superior species, no commercial hatchery technology and no commercial feed formulations. One of

Tung claims that Vietnam is probably the only nation doing spiny lobster farming on a large scale. Tung completed his Bachelor's degree at Nha Trang University, and then worked as a junior lecturer at the university. In 1996, he won a scholarship from Japan to study for his master's degree at the Asian Institute of Technology (AlT) in Bangkok, Thailand. He then worked for AlT as a researcher for a while before going to Australia to do his Ph.D. at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. My Masters and Ph.D. research were in shrimp, working with the reproductive biology of Penaeus monodon (black tiger shrimp) and P. merguiensis (banana prawn). I have since diversified my research interests into slipper lobster, which is an alternative aquaculture species to the spiny lobster. This is because the larval rearing phase of the slipper lobster is much shorter and the value is quite high, almost that of the spiny lobster. It fetches $40/kg in the domestic market." Tung's current research,