By Monal Lal, Johnson Seeto and Tim Pickering

A milestone in aquaculture research has been achieved at the Seawater Laboratory of the Division of Marine Studies at the University of the South Pacific (USP). In post-graduate research co-supervised by SPC’s Aquaculture Section, the Monkey River prawn Macrobrachium lar has been successfully reared in captivity for the first time ever — from eggs through the planktonic larval phase of their lifecycle to the post-larval stage.