Selective Breeding of Penaeus vannamei: Impact on World Aquaculture and Lessons for Future

Shrimp farmers want fast growing shrimp that can resist common diseases and get good survivals in pond culture. The SPF Penaeus vannamei have produced these results and most of Asia has switched to farming SPF P. vannamei. Downward price pressure in the market is causing farmers to demand still better performance to remain profitable. The best opportunity to improve economic performance in shrimp farming is through selective breeding of the commercial shrimp stocks. Three different approaches to shrimp breeding are being employed globally. First is the SPF model, undertaken by US-based breeding companies who supply most of Asia's shrimp broodstock. SPF stocks selected for fast growth have resulted in significant improvements up to 10% gain per generation. Average daily gain (ADG) now exceeds 0.3 gram per day (gpd). In farms stocked at more than 100 PL/m2, farmers harvest 20 g shrimp in less than 100 DOC. These results have propelled the industry forward and India is one of the largest beneficiaries of this approach. A second approach to breeding shrimp is the Ecuador model. Ecuador is the leading shrimp farming country in the Western Hemisphere. Following an industry crash caused by White Spot Virus in 1999, the Ecuador industry initiated a breeding program based on collecting survivors of pond mortality events and over time created a stock of shrimp that are genetically tolerant to WSSV infection. While these efforts ignored the growth characteristics of the shrimp, pond survival rates steadily increased generation by generation and the industry not only recovered from the WSSV problems, it flourished with production of 500,000 MT in 2018. A third model for shrimp breeding combines both approaches. It has been called the SPF/SPT model (Alday-Sanz et al., 2018). This approach starts with a pathogen-tolerant stock as founding stock, passes them through an SPF development process and results in an SPF/SPT stock that are both SPF (pathogen free) with pathogen-tolerant genetics.