It’s a beautiful Sunday morning at Loch Slapin on the Isle of Skye, and Dr.

“Mussel farming is being viewed as a new generation of food production that has the potential to help feed a growing population while restoring native biodiversity that has been degraded or destroyed by pollution and harmful fishing practices,” said Dr. Airnes.

“Raising mussels with snares creates a marine habitat, a permanent ecosystem. All you have to do is twist the rope so there’s always habitat there.” Airnes says this increases biomass by 3.6 times and biodiversity by 1.6 times.

Brown explains that mussels cling to anything they can find in the water, in this case four 220-meter-long ropes.

Aside from wire grooming and redistribution to help them spread at an early age, no extra effort is required – unlike most other rearing methods. Mussels simply grow in their natural environment without the need for additional food, water or anything else.

John Holmyard of Offshore Shellfish Farm, the UK’s first all-seas off-line mussel farm off the Devon coast, describes it as ‘like walking from a rut into a forest’.

“The thread shells provide habitat for everything else. Countless creatures live around and on the mussel. They can just be little worms or molluscs… [hoặc] a large number of fish. Last year we even raised bluefin tuna on a farm that has mud-eating crustaceans that feed on mussels.”

dr Emma Sheehan, Associate Professor of Marine Ecology at the University of Plymouth, has been working with Holmyard since 2013, studying the farm’s ecological impact.

“We were really interested in understanding how the mussel farm interacts with the entire marine ecosystem over time,” she says. There are many species, many scavengers, but diversity is very low.”

“We found [trang trại] provide habitat for all kinds of species: hundreds of thousands of brown crabs, scallops, and all kinds of species that don’t need a lot of habitat,” she added.

PhD students Danielle Bridger and Llucia Mascorda Cabre are collecting data from the farm and comparing it to nearby control areas in Lyme Bay. “After eight years, the overall diversity and abundance of mobile species on the farm had increased by more than 33 percent compared to the control areas,” Bridger said.

Though the project is still in its infancy, Brown and Airnes said inspection of their ropes revealed a growing food chain that was “strong and happy from top to bottom.”

“All of a sudden you have a whole food system… You have bigger fish down to sharks and down to small mollusks. As we dived and looked at the dive sites we saw huge garbage dumps, lots of killer whales, shrimp and lumpfish. We’ve seen small cateye sharks at the sites,” Brown said, adding that “the hanging ropes create this habitat.”

Mussels do not provide food, shelter, or structure for other marine life, but they also play an important role in improving the overall quality of the water. It is estimated that each mussel can filter 25 liters of water per day. “They eat nutrients and reduce eutrophication [sự phát triển quá mức của thực vật và tảo]. They keep the water and everything else clean,” said Dr. Airnes.

Much of the water on the west coast of Scotland is clean and unpolluted, but much of the British coast is heavily polluted. Sheehan believes mussel farms can take steps to restore and clean up the natural habitat that existed before industrial fishing began.

“Imagine if the entire seabed was covered with coral reefs of oysters or mussels, which are constantly filtered, filtering the water from organic and inorganic matter; Because of years of bottom fishing, they’ve largely disappeared,” Sheehan said.

Vertical mussel farming in the water column also increases the possibility of alternative land uses and a solution to the nutritional needs of a growing world population. According to a recent report, “Muslim agriculture requires no feed or antibiotics and emits very few greenhouse gases compared to land-based meat production or fish farming…”

The article estimates the greenhouse gas emissions from mussel farming at 0.6 CO2e/kg compared to cows, which emit between 19 and 36.7 CO2e/kg.

“The environment would be better if we could start using mussel protein more than some of the other proteins that affect carbon production,” Sheehan said.

However, she is also cautious about encouraging the spread of mussel farming. “Everything is always about scale. We’re certainly not saying you can farm everywhere… We’re still introducing physical structures at sea, we definitely still want areas that aren’t full of human structures. We need to find an area that has a really good balance where we can still raise these amazing species for food and benefit from the marine ecosystem services they provide.”