A shrimp by any other name …

Upstrum’s hatchery supplies post-larvae and juveniles of macrobrachium rosenbergii with the primary purpose of consumption.

“I've shipped more than 140 million animals from here … and if you did some math, the amount that my farmers and my customers grew would be about 9,000 tons of shrimp,” Upstrum said.

Prawns are shrimp-like creatures, although they are biologically different people often use the terms interchangeably in the kitchen.

Upstrum ships prawns by air to domestic and foreign markets as far as the Philippines, the Middle East, and Europe. Although, Food security is Upstrum’s primary motivation for the work he does, he said. He also ships his prawns to a variety of markets, such as research institutes, colleges and even high schools for studies, as well as to zoos and aquariums as live food.

Developments

The prawn hatchery stage begins at Aquaculture of Texas and takes about 30 days. Then they enter the nursery phase for about 45 to 60 days, before they're shipped out to the farmer. The farmer puts them in a pond for about four months, and then they are ready to harvest and sell, Upstrum said. 

The prawn and shrimp market is a large industry across the globe, and Upstrum has developed techniques like the split-phase hatchery, regional nurseries, and tanks to hold a larger density of prawns, to help improve efficacy and increase production, he said. 

The split-phase hatchery is a technique that helps the prawn capture food. According to Upstrum, the first week after hatching, the prawn cannot swim to their food; the food has to bump into them. So, “I raise them at an incredibly high density so that I can have the food at a high density; it's a live food, and so they bump into it and can eat,” he said. Then, once they begin swimming after their food, he splits them into a lower-density container so they are not crowded.

The split-phase hatchery technique “has been adopted by many places … Countries like “Greece, Canada, Trinidad, and Tobago, Japan, and Brazil have all sent personnel from their governments here to learn my system,” Upstrum said.

However, his biggest accomplishment, he said, has been that the technique was taken to Africa for the repopulation of one of their native shrimps to help control schistosomiasis or snail fever, “a disease caused by parasitic worms … It is the second most dangerous parasitic disease after malaria. The parasites that cause schistosomiasis live in certain types of freshwater snails,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Upstrum’s technique is used to raise the shrimp population, which helps disease control through shrimp feeding on the snails.

Upstrum also standardized the timeline and prawn density for nurseries, utilizing substrates to efficiently nurse them, he said.

The nursery phase in the hatchery is “an intermediate production stage, positioned between the hatchery (larval/post-larval production) and grow-out, where young animals are reared at high density in controlled, closely monitored conditions until they reach a size hardy enough for the less-controlled grow-out environment,” according to FCRSOFT.

Upstrum standardized the terms 30-day juvenile, 45-day juvenile, and 60-day juvenile for smoother nursery phase operation.

“There was no standard,” he said. “You'd read research papers, and they'd say they stocked a juvenile but…you didn't know what they started with.”

This mattered to Upstrum because the size of the prawns determined the density they could be kept at in the nursery phase.

To keep more prawn in a tank at once comfortably, Upstrum created substrates by making a box of PVC pipe and horizontal layers of bird netting to increase the amount of area. Doing so he can stock, “post larvae to Day 45, up to 40 animals per square foot; post larvae to Day 60, up to 20 animals per square foot; and from Day 60 to Day 90, no more than two animals per square foot.

After Day 90, the space needed is 1 to 2.5 square feet per animal,” according to the Aquaculture of Texas website. The substrates allow for “more shrimp in a tank, which makes it profitable to do,” Upstrum said.

The concept of regional nurseries was also created by Upstrum, he said, to develop a process that is cost-efficient and an effective way to produce and distribute prawns.

Under the system, Upstrum sends post-larvae to regional nurseries around the country. The nurseries follow his tank technique to raise the post-larvae to juveniles before selling to farmers. 

This process is effective because, “I was able to produce enough PLs (post-larvae) to keep me in business, and then of course the nursery people were able to sell post-larvae and make a profit there. But most importantly, the farmer in the area could then afford and stock a shrimp in his pond, and he could make a profit then growing shrimp in a pond,” Upstrum said.

“Dr. [Dallas] Flickinger from Lincoln University informed me that they have actually copied my model to improve the stability of the Brazilian freshwater shrimp industry,” Upstrum said. 

Accomplishments

Through Upstrum’s years as the president of the hatchery, he has experienced a variety of notable milestones. He has published scientific journals and reviewed PhD and master’s theses, taught a class at Weatherford College, and welcomed visitors from Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, as well as the Kaufman County Ag Department, and an entire Idaho senior high school class. The World News and various local papers have highlighted Upstrum’s work.

At one point Upstrum was the only person in the Western Hemisphere to actually produce all-male freshwater prawns, and the World Aquaculture Association conference meeting was held in Arlington, “purposely so that people from attending that meeting could visit this farm,” Upstrum said.

Through each milestone, accomplishment, and development Aquaculture of Texas has experienced, Upstrum’s efforts go forth toward his goal of “continuing to supply farmers around the world,” he said.