Mote Marine Laboratory

Environmental Win-Win

Mote Aquaculture Park’s focus on sustaining natural resources has resulted in an innovative project where the park’s effluent is being used to grow wetland plants. The plants, in turn, are cleaning the water to make it reusable for plant and eventually fish production. Because of Mote’s water-recycling technology, only 15 percent of the freshwater used at the park is diverted to a series of water treatment ponds and then used for irrigation. The goal is to reduce the water treated in ponds to five percent.

“Right now we use the water to irrigate pasture land on the property, but we hope to eventually bring the water back into our aquaculture production facility to use it to grow more fish — to completely close the loop,” says Dr. Kevan Main, director of Mote’s Center for Aquaculture Research and Development.

The project is a partnership with a local Sarasota company called Aquatic Plants of Florida, Inc. Here’s how it works:

• Wastewater from the fish tanks is filtered, and solid material is piped into an effluent pond, where a natural biological process breaks down the waste.
• Using gravity, the water flows into a second pond with visibly cleaner water, and then to a series of additional ponds near the first pond.
• Wetlands vegetation is planted in these ponds to absorb the excreted nutrients, such as phosphorous and nitrogen. The phosphorous and nitrogen help the plants grow as the plants purify the water.

Aquatic Plants of Florida eventually harvests the plants and moves them to areas where they’re used to restore important wetlands.

The project is unique in that it cleans up wastewater and that the plants being raised are eventually used to restore wetlands altered by development, Main says. “We really are working on a number of different levels to make sure that Mote Aquaculture Park is truly sustainable. Using environmentally sound practices — whether in animal husbandry techniques or finding unique ways to use some of the byproducts — is an important area that we’re focused on here. These things must be key to developing new aquaculture practices in the U.S.”  

Learn more about: Mote Aquaculture Park

If we could use sand dollars to fund our research, we'd be out scouring the beaches of the world from dawn to dusk. But since we can't, we look to you. Please support the restorative research efforts at Mote Aquaculture Park and Mote Marine Laboratory.