Influences of Stock and Site on Growth and Mortality in the Blue Mussel (Mytilus edulis)

Abstract

Reciprocal transfers of three blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) stocks among three rearing sites resulted in marked changes in growth, mortality, and maximum biomass. Results indicate that site differences were major determinants of the growth effects, while stock differences were chiefly responsible for the mortality effects. The overall effect on biomass and potential yield was approximately equally attributable to site and stock influences. The results have relevance to aquaculture and environmental assessment using mussels and illustrate genotypic responses that may be significant for fisheries management.

Growth of mussels (Mytilus edulis galloprovincialis) on cultivation rafts: influence of seed source, cultivation site and phytoplankton availability

“…Widdows et al (1984), studying two populations of M. edulis in Great Britain, concluded that the physiological differences between the populations, which were the main reasons underlying growth differences, were the result of different environmental conditions rather than genetic factors. Dickie et al (1984) and Mallet and Carver (1989) also found that site was the main factor affecting growth in Canadian mussels, and Page and Hubbard (1987) detected a close correlation between chlorophyll a and growth in M. edulis. In our case, chlorophyll a content of the water is a secondary factor explaining growth variation compared to the major effect of the actual phytoplankton availability, as determined by the current speed, and agrees with the estimations from Frechette et al (1989).…”

“…Mallet et al (1987) stated that stock differences were important in explaining the variation in shell growth, but site alone accounted for most of the variation in tissue growth. Several authors claimed that stock does not appreciably affect growth rate, while it does affect mortality (Wallace, 1980;Dickie et al, 1984;Page and Hubbard, 1987;Mallet and Carver, 1989). This conclusion was also reached by Fuentes et al…”

“…The growth rate, mortality and production traits of mussels vary widely among different stocks of Mytilus edulis cultured in Europe and America (Pérez Camacho and Román, 1979;Dickie et al, 1984;Mallet and Carver, 1989;Kautsky et al, 1990). The growth of suspension-feeding bivalves is dependent upon a number of endogenous and environmental factors (Bayne and Newell, 1983), but especially the amount of food ingested, which depends upon the food availability and filtration rate (Wallace, 1980;(Tenore and Gonzalez, 1976;Rosenberg and Loo, 1983;Smaal and Stralen, 1990) and varies with the current speed in the cultivation area (Frechette et al, 1989).…”

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“…Local factors that determine nutritional conditions can greatly influence the growth rate of marine bivalves (Karayücel and Karayücel, 2000;Karayucel et al, 2003a;Erdemir Yiğin and Tuncer, 2004;Ozernyurk and Zotin, 2006;Yıldız et al, 2006;Peharda et al, 2007). Important factors in growth rate are particulate organic matter (Thompson and Nickols, 1988;Garen et al, 2004), duration of air exposure (Seed, 1969), population density (Peterson and Beal, 1989;Ramsay et al, 2008), genotypic characteristic (Dickie et al, 1984;Skidmore and Chew, 1985) and water current vellocity (Grizzle and Morin, 1989).…”

Environment drives physiological variability in the cold seep mussel Bathymodiolus childressi

“…However, different bivalve populations often respond differently to a given set of environmental conditions, reflecting the effects of genetic dif-ferentiation on organism response. Cold hardiness, growth, mortality, and biomass of bivalves have all been shown to be under some level of genetic control (Dickie et al 1984;Mallet et al 1986Mallet et al , 1987.…”