Engineering Prof, Students Working to Get Salmon in the Pink
Engineering Prof, Students Working to Get Salmon in the Pink
November 14, 2003
Hundreds of thousands of salmon being farmed in Chile and elsewhere have many of the attributes discriminating chefs and their customers, along with home cooks, are yearning for: They have the right taste. They are the right size. They are pretty much everything but the right color.
The salmon are shades of white instead of the pink hue buyers, diners and cooks in America and elsewhere have come to expect. And for aesthetically oriented, demanding consumers that?s just not good enough.
Dr. Zenaida Otero Gephardt, a chemical engineering professor at Rowan University, is working with her students, as well as professors in Chile, to put those salmon in the pink.
Gephardt spent six weeks in Chile this summer teaching and conducting research at the Universidad De La Serena in La Serena. This fall, Dr. Joel Barraza, a mechanical engineering professor from Universidad Catolica del Norte in Coquimbo spent five weeks working with Gephardt at Rowan.
During both exchanges, Gephardt and her partners worked on supercritical fluid extraction: extracting pigment from algae that can be transformed into a substance to be fed to salmon in salmon farms to make them pink. Their ultimate goal is to grow algae from which pigment can be harvested, extracting the pigment and developing natural food products ? such as a powder that can be mixed with fish food ? that will turn the salmon pink.
Gephardt, who was invited to Universidad De La Serena by professors who knew of her work, explained that salmon are not naturally pink in and of themselves. They are pink because of the pink food ? such as algae and shrimp ? that they feed upon in their natural state in the ocean.
But salmon farms ? large cages that may hold a hundred thousand salmon ? don?t offer and can?t provide the amount of pink-tinged natural wildlife that so many salmon would need to consume.
Gephardt, colleagues and students in Gephardt?s junior-senior engineering clinic at Rowan are working to remove the pigment from algae they grow in Rowan?s Biological Sciences Department.
This work may make a difference in some economies. Gephardt noted the salmon farmers are competing in a world market ripe with pink salmon. ?When people think of salmon, they think pink,? she said.
Chile, a coastal South American country which in 2002 exported 375,013 tons of farmed salmon, would like to further its standing in the salmon industry.
?There is a push in the country to strengthen the salmon industry,? Gephardt said. ?This is a collaboration where we can make a difference.?
Students working with Gephardt on the project are:
Danielle Baldwin, Toms River
Elizabeth DiPaolo, Wenonah
William Henderson, Bricktown
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The salmon are shades of white instead of the pink hue buyers, diners and cooks in America and elsewhere have come to expect. And for aesthetically oriented, demanding consumers that?s just not good enough.
Dr. Zenaida Otero Gephardt, a chemical engineering professor at Rowan University, is working with her students, as well as professors in Chile, to put those salmon in the pink.
Gephardt spent six weeks in Chile this summer teaching and conducting research at the Universidad De La Serena in La Serena. This fall, Dr. Joel Barraza, a mechanical engineering professor from Universidad Catolica del Norte in Coquimbo spent five weeks working with Gephardt at Rowan.
During both exchanges, Gephardt and her partners worked on supercritical fluid extraction: extracting pigment from algae that can be transformed into a substance to be fed to salmon in salmon farms to make them pink. Their ultimate goal is to grow algae from which pigment can be harvested, extracting the pigment and developing natural food products ? such as a powder that can be mixed with fish food ? that will turn the salmon pink.
Gephardt, who was invited to Universidad De La Serena by professors who knew of her work, explained that salmon are not naturally pink in and of themselves. They are pink because of the pink food ? such as algae and shrimp ? that they feed upon in their natural state in the ocean.
But salmon farms ? large cages that may hold a hundred thousand salmon ? don?t offer and can?t provide the amount of pink-tinged natural wildlife that so many salmon would need to consume.
Gephardt, colleagues and students in Gephardt?s junior-senior engineering clinic at Rowan are working to remove the pigment from algae they grow in Rowan?s Biological Sciences Department.
This work may make a difference in some economies. Gephardt noted the salmon farmers are competing in a world market ripe with pink salmon. ?When people think of salmon, they think pink,? she said.
Chile, a coastal South American country which in 2002 exported 375,013 tons of farmed salmon, would like to further its standing in the salmon industry.
?There is a push in the country to strengthen the salmon industry,? Gephardt said. ?This is a collaboration where we can make a difference.?
Students working with Gephardt on the project are:
Danielle Baldwin, Toms River
Elizabeth DiPaolo, Wenonah
William Henderson, Bricktown
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