By the end of August, the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s (UNCW) aquaculture facility behind the Wrightsville Beach municipal complex will be expanded to accommodate the many projects and functions of the center and its research staff.
Wade Watanabe, research professor and aquaculture program director, said the group, currently operating out of the old Center for Marine Sciences building located near Crocker’s Marine on Eastwood Road, will be moving out of the building soon, as the building was sold a number of years ago, and a new Center for Marine Sciences was built in Myrtle Grove.
“The aquaculture program is very related to the facility on the beach, next to the municipal center, so it just doesn’t make sense for us to be at the Myrtle Grove facility, logistically, having to go back and forth that far to Wrightsville Beach,” Watanabe said.
The newly renovated building at the beach will provide laboratory space to support the research and development work in marine finfish aquaculture.
“Our facilities on Harbor Island, as they stand now,
Staff photo by Dana Hawley
A new building on the site of UNCW’s aquaculture facility will give researchers additional laboratory space at the Wrightsville Beach facility. |
are strictly fish culture facilities — tanks, water pumps, filters, etc. — specific to raising fish,” Watanabe said. “But all of our analytical labs are back here at the Center for Marine Sciences and research, at the mainland. So our more sensitive water quality analysis and chemical analysis of fish tissues and fish feeds are really done here. Since we have to move out of this
building (on Eastwood Road), we’re building a laboratory right on the Harbor Island site itself, to take the place of all of these analytical labs that we’ll be losing when we have to move out.”
The building, which is required to be on pilings to meet Wrightsville Beach’s flood requirements, will be approximately 32 feet wide and 82 feet long.
In a recent e-mail, Watanabe said that the top floor of the facility would provide approximately 2,600 square feet of space, which will serve multiple functions, including dry laboratories for microscopic work, analytical work on fish tissues and fish feeds, and water quality analyses.
The area will also include a feed preparation area to prepare experimental diets for the fish on site, as well as a reception area, an office/computer room, break room and restrooms for both men and women.
The area underneath the laboratory will hold hatchery tanks for raising fish from eggs through their juvenile stages.
Watanabe, who has been with the university for 10 years, is currently working with a full-time research staff of between five and six individuals.
While the work at the aquaculture facility originally focused on algal research, more recently, the center has shifted its focus and become primarily concerned with raising marine species of fish that are indigenous to North Carolina and have been threatened by overfishing.
