Research aimed at helping the aquaculture industry to control commercial shellfish breeding is one of the big winners in the latest round of government science funding.
Nelson's Cawthron Institute will receive almost $21 million over seven years for the cultured shellfish programme that it is leading in collabaration with other research bodies, universities and marine farming companies.
Project leader Nick King says the industry is still having to rely mostly on wild shellfish stocks for breeding. The new funding continues research that started about 15 years ago to change that.
"One of the real challenges is figuring out how to grow the baby shellfish so that you can apply the same kind of domestication practices that have been used on land," he says.
"At the moment, if you think about mussels, most of the spat they used to seed mussel lines in New Zealand come from the wild. And in a way it's like if cattle farmers went off to Mesopotamia and herded up wild auroch to bring back and farm, you'd have none of those benefits of breeding that we enjoy in farming.
"And you don't have control over availability."