An exciting future for IMAS Taroona

Australia's seafood sector, encompassing wild capture fisheries, aquaculture, recreational and First Nations practices, generates more than $3.4 billion annually: $1.94 billion from aquaculture and $1.51 billion from wild fisheries. Seafood is now the fourth most consumed protein in Australia and a significant source of omega-3 fatty acids, iodine, iron and zinc, supporting public health and national food security. Tasmania is the largest state contributor to that value, through salmonid aquaculture and high-value wild fisheries including rock lobster and abalone.

Sustaining that productivity is increasingly complex. Climate change is reshaping marine ecosystems, coastal environments are absorbing the cumulative effects of multiple human pressures, and biosecurity risks emerge faster than the capacity to anticipate them.

For almost 30 years the Taroona campus has hosted a joint venture between the Tasmanian Government and the University of Tasmania, under which IMAS researchers deliver the science that underpins the management of Tasmania's marine resources. That work is recognised internationally and applied well beyond Tasmanian waters.

The Ocean is the contemporary, appropriately scaled home for that work: a place where the next generation of fisheries and aquaculture scientists and managers learn alongside the researchers delivering it.

It is also our strategy made real, building the skills Tasmania needs, lifting productivity while managing impacts, and adding to the long story of an island that has always lived by the sea. The knowledge made here will help Tasmania, and the world, keep eating well from a changing ocean.

Tasmania's waters hold species found nowhere else on earth, and some of them are running out of time. IMAS Taroona is where much of the work to keep them here is done.

The campus supports the conservation breeding program for the red handfish, a species now reduced to a few small reefs, and houses the insurance population of the Maugean skate, an ancient animal surviving only in Macquarie Harbour. In 2024, a skate hatched from a captive laid egg for the first time anywhere in the world.

Other work rebuilds habitat itself. Researchers here are trialling seagrass restoration alongside OzFish and community volunteers, and cultivating giant kelp selected for tolerance to warmer water, so that Tasmania's underwater forests have a future in a rapidly warming sea.

The site is also gearing up for selective breeding and release programs, beginning with sand flathead, supporting the recovery of a fishery that generations of Tasmanian families have grown up with, in the Derwent and beyond.

This is climate adaptation in practice, done with the community rather than apart from it, with divers, volunteers, anglers, government and industry all playing a part. Students train inside these programs, learning conservation by doing it. The Ocean gives that work the home it needs.

The climate-driven range extension of the longspined sea urchin (Centrostephanus rodgersii) into Tasmania is transforming rocky reef ecosystems. By overgrazing kelp and other seaweeds, high densities of urchins create extensive urchin barrens with reduced biodiversity and productivity, threatening Tasmania's iconic kelp forests and valuable abalone fisheries.

IMAS research is developing practical solutions. Working closely with government and the fishing industry, researchers are investigating how targeted harvesting and other control measures can reduce urchin populations to levels that allow kelp forests to recover, including large-scale trials demonstrating how commercial fishing can become an active tool for restoring productive reef ecosystems.

New systems at Taroona take that work further. Holding and rearing facilities designed for this purpose let researchers study the animal itself: how it grows, how it reproduces, how it responds to conditions in a warming sea, and what its arrival means for reefs and for the fisheries that depend on them. Understanding the species closely is what turns a problem into a set of options.

Those options include circularity. Rather than treating removed urchins simply as a pest, IMAS is working with industry to explore how they can become a valuable resource. Harvested urchins can support seafood production, and there are opportunities to use the whole animal and develop new products and markets.

The approach connects climate adaptation, fisheries science, ecosystem restoration and the circular economy, turning a growing ecological challenge into healthier reefs, sustainable industries and stronger regional communities.

Some things cannot be taught from a lecture theatre. At IMAS Taroona, the water is a few steps from the door.

Our Taroona Campus looks out over the River Derwent into Storm Bay and the adjacent Crayfish Point Reserve, where dolphins, seals and migrating whales are regularly visible from campus. The reserve is more than a view. It has hosted controlled, real-world studies across a range of species, giving our researchers deep insight into the biology, behaviour and ecological role of key aquatic inhabitants, and allowing them to develop and test survey methods that are then scaled up to understand the wider marine environment and the resources it holds. Students will have the opportunity to move between the bench and the shoreline all in a day's work, sampling the system they are studying rather than reading about it second-hand. Fieldwork here is not an occasional excursion. It is the ordinary rhythm of the place.

What makes The Ocean unusual is that teaching, research and industry collaboration now sit together on one campus. A student walks past the tanks holding threatened species, the offices running fisheries assessments, and the people whose science shapes how Tasmania and the world manage its marine resources. Undergraduates work beside postgraduates, technicians and researchers, and the distance between learning something and doing it becomes very short.

Having that natural classroom on the doorstep is the ultimate experiential learning experience for the future leaders of fisheries and aquaculture research, management and sustainable production: people equipped to keep the marine environment healthy and vibrant while it feeds a growing global population.

Seawater drawn directly from the Derwent onto the Taroona site has to be of the highest quality, because it sustains the animals held here, including endangered species and the most delicate early life stages of marine animals.

At its finest, that seawater is filtered to around one micron, removing particles smaller than one millionth of a metre. A human hair is roughly seventy times wider. Different parts of the campus draw seawater treated to the level their work requires, from robust process seawater for the largest systems through to the finest filtration for the most sensitive research.

IMAS has developed and refined these systems over many years, and that capability has enabled discoveries that could not have happened elsewhere. Taroona was the first place in the world to close the full twenty-four-month life cycle of the juvenile southern rock lobster, a feat that depended entirely on holding seawater clean and stable enough for larvae to survive.

The reputation of the IMAS filtration methodology to reliably produce high volumes of quality seawater extended well beyond the facility. During a successful 12-month trial, the Australian Antarctic Division used seawater sourced from IMAS to rear Antarctic krill across all life stages. Historically AAD has sourced from south-east Bruny Island. Ultimately it is the seawater quality that led the Division to co-locate its krill facility at The Ocean, bringing Antarctic and Tasmanian marine science together on one campus.

The development has also delivered a major upgrade and expansion of the filtration system, supporting more research, more teaching and more discovery across marine ecosystems.

The scale we operate is considerable. The campus processes almost five million litres of seawater every day, equivalent to nearly two Olympic-sized swimming pools passing through the site between one morning and the next. Aquaculture systems are recirculating with advanced filtration, temperature control and built-in redundancy, allowing researchers to maintain stable conditions or deliberately replicate future ocean environments. Students learn within these systems, where the technical foundations of a marine science career are developed.

Seawater returning to the Derwent is treated to a high standard as well, with the water leaving the site cleaner than it arrived.

It is one reason this stretch of the Derwent has produced some of the most significant aquaculture discoveries in Australia, and at times the world.

• IMAS Taroona will host the Dr Isobel Bennett Southern Ocean Research Aquarium, operated by the Australian Antarctic Division.
• Antarctic krill are transferred directly from the RSV Nuyina into specialised containerised systems, remaining in controlled conditions from Antarctica to Hobart.
• This system has reduced krill mortality from around 90% to approximately 10%, representing a step‑change in Southern Ocean research capability.

• Krill are maintained in Antarctic Southern Ocean conditions at a temperature of 0.5°C.
• Instead of discarding heat generated during the chilling process, mechanical systems harness and repurpose this energy to contribute to critical biological research systems and space heating, significantly improving overall energy efficiency and reducing carbon impact.
• The project incorporates mass timber, low carbon concrete and careful material selection, contributing up to ~30% embodied carbon reduction compared to traditional construction approaches.