Download AEBR 368/2025 A quantitative assessment of mussel nursery site performance in four geographical regions

A single batch of mussel spat from Ninety Mile Beach was split among 15 marine farms across four regions (Banks Peninsula, Golden Bay, Coromandel, Marlborough Sounds) to measure differences in the retention (i.e., the number of mussel spat remaining on the farm) and growth of the mussel spat during a 5 month deployment.

By splitting a single batch of spat we reduced some of the variability that can make it hard to determine which are good farms for growing spat.

We found that some regions performed better than others although sometimes the performance of spat was highly variable within a region.

The next steps will be to assess the performance data alongside environmental data to try to understand what drives spat performance in New Zealand’s mussel farming regions.