On February 2, Ministry of Agriculture of China released a list of 12 newly authorized varieties of aquatic product, which contains “Bohai Hong”, a new scallop strain raised by the scientific research team of professor Wang Chunde from Marine Science and Engineering College of QAU.

“Bohai Red” is a new strain of scallop developed through four generations of selective breeding that descends from the population of F1 generation, which is obtained by the hybridisation of Peruvian scallop (Argopecten purpuratus) introduced from Peru and bay scallop (Argopecten trradiaus) from Qingdao local aquaculture farms. The hybridization experiment adopted the technique of population selective breeding, using growth rate and shell colour as the breeding index. The new strain inherited the excellent genes from both parents, such as bright shell colour, high yields, rich nutrition and delicious meat. Compared with the average bay scallop, it increased by more than 37% in wet weight and more than 49% in adductor muscle weight. “Bohai Red” is fit to live in the waters of Bohai Sea and Yellow Sea. In Shandong, Hebei, Liaoning and many traditional primary scallop producing areas, the large scale breeding of “Bohai Red” has been put into practice, and the testing breeding has been implemented in the waters of southern China such as Fujian and Guangdong by now.

Bay scallop is the main product of scallop aquacultures in northern China, but in recent years it was subject to several troubles, for instance, its small size and the germplasm degradation in the process of breeding, which led to the lower standard of commercial scallops, and bay scallops gradually became low-end products in the international market. Hopefully, the successful producing of “Bohai Red” is expected to solve the problems therefore to increase the coverage of improved variety and support the development of China’s Blue Economy.

Translated by Shang Shuai    edited by Gao Xiuxue