Long-term study on survival and development of successive generations of Mytilus galloprovincialis cryopreserved larvae

Shellfish aquaculture needs the development of new tools for the improvement of good practices avoiding the reliance on natural spat collection to increase production efficiently. The aim of this work was to improve the cryopreservation protocol for Mytilus galloprovincialis larvae described in Paredes et al. (in: Wolkers, Oldenhof (eds) Cryopreservation and freeze-drying protocol, methods in molecular biology, Humana Press, 2021, pp 2180, 10.1007/978-1-0716-0783-1_18). Moreover, the capability of producing adult mussels from cryopreserved 72 h-old D-larvae and potential long-term effects of cryopreservation through progenies were evaluated. The selection of 72-h old D-larvae for cryopreservation yielded 75% of recovery, higher than 50% from trochophores. The best combination was 10% Ethylene–Glycol + 0.4 M Trehalose in Filtered Sea Water (FSW) with cooling at − 1 °C/min and a water bath at 35 °C for thawing. Sucrose (SUC) solutions did not improve larval recovery (p > 0.05). At settlement, 5.26% of cryopreserved F1 larvae survived and over 70% settled. F2 cryopreservation produced 0.15% survival of spat and settlement varied from 35 to 50%. The delay of shell size showed on cryopreserved larvae declined throughout larval rearing without significant differences with controls from settlement point (p > 0.05). Long-term experiments showed that it is possible to obtain adult mussels from cryopreserved larvae and this tool does not compromise the quality of following progenies, neither for cryopreservation nor post-thawing development of them.