When they are about a year old, they are scraped off and brought to the on-bottom culture plots. Quickly, these collectors were shown to be an effective means of increasing the total amount of seed available to mussel farmers, and also shown to have equal or higher fitness than wild seed (Kamermans et al., 2009). However, the small size of the mussels and their sessile nature makes them susceptible to attack by predators, such as the sea star Asterias rubens