An experimental assessment of the potential impacts of longline mussel farming on the infauna in an open coastal embayment.

1. The existence of perceived ecological impacts and development of adaptive management solutions to mitigate these problems are important issues in sustainable aquaculture. This paper examines the general impacts of two newly established trial longline installations on the infauna in Twofold Bay, a large, coastal embayment in south-east Australia. 2. We hypothesized that the physical presence of these longline installations and the biological activities of the mussels they supported would result in temporal changes in densities of infaunal taxa below installations differing from those at undisturbed control sites. We also predicted different patterns of variability in infauna between longline and control sites from before to after the longlines were stocked. These hypotheses were tested by using a beyond-BACI sampling design and asymmetrical analyses of variance to compare changes in densities of taxa at several different spatial scales below the proposed longline sites with those at two adjacent control sites, before and after the longlines were stocked. 3. After 18 months of longline operations, there was no evidence of any impact on total number of taxa, nor densities of individual taxa. Short-term temporal trends in densities in plots at control sites from April to May 2001 were often as different from each other as from those at the longline site. This indicates that densities of taxa at the farm site were within the range typically found at undisturbed sites, so there were no ecological impacts from the farm. 4. These results do not concur with previous studies on impact of mussel farming in semi-enclosed coastal waters. Differences in location, scale of production, duration of operation and assimilative capacity of the environment probably contributed to this discrepancy. The infauna in Twofold Bay either do not respond to this form of disturbance or have not yet been exposed to disturbance of a sufficient magnitude, or for a sufficient period of time, to elicit a detectable response. Better definition of the potential ecological impacts associated with aquaculture, plus their scale and magnitude in different environments is needed to design experiments and monitoring programmes to detect specific impacts. This activity can only be considered sustainable once we know that these impacts are localized, reversible and short-term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]