John Stephanis, Managing Director SELONDA Aquaculture S.A. and FEAP President presented his insights on the growout challenges before aquaculture. In March 2007 he identified the following issues as he commented on open ocean cage systems:

• present in Mediterranean, Ireland,US, Norway, Brazil, South Korea
• operation of 1000 ton cage systems in exposed sites requires robust equipment
• less competition with other coastal zone users
• higher investment cost
• construction of submersible cages (questions as to economic performance?)
• automation of feeding
• self sufficient remote monitoring and maintenance
• automatic net cleaning
• harvesting and transport
• insurance and risk management
• health management
• specialised personnel

The full presentation used by Mr Stephanis is available by clicking this link.

The aquaculture industry recognises that there is a clear relationship between improvements in fish welfare, consumer confidence and the production of premium quality fish.

An exceptional resource in terms of papers and presentations on fish welfare and the quality/productivity equation from May 2007 is available here.

In particular, Alan Dykes outlines in his paper the challenges created by fish welfare for aquaculture. These include:

• the need to establish agreed standards for operational welfare indicators
• standards are required for measurement of overall welfare
• standards are required for measuring the costs and benefits of welfare
• different societies have differing values with respect to welfare

Machine vision and image analysis can enable the sorting of fish into “production”, “ordinary” and “superior” classes.

Today, fish are graded manually by employees who assess their shape, colour and any surface injuries to the fish. Consumers demand salmon fillets that are fresh and regular in colour and shape. This can be difficult to achieve using a manual approach.

Automation can increase productivity and raise processing rates while improving the consistency of classification. Norwegian science organisation SINTEF has supported an array of research projects related to automated processing of aquaculture product. Information about its automated fish processing capabilities can be found here.

The Australian Broadcasting Commission ran over six minutes of video on the breakthrough achieved by CleanSeas Tuna in Port Lincoln South Australia. Cleanseas Chairman Hagen Stehr recounts the critical steps in the process of collecting the first fertilised egg produced by a Southern Bluefin Tuna in captivity.

The video segment may be viewed by clicking on this link. Breakthrough boosts fishing industry.

The transcript of the story is available here.

Vodcasts of the video ‘Breakthrough boosts fishing industry’ may be downloaded here.

Clean Seas Tuna Limited announced a world first breakthrough by becoming the first organisation in the world to create an artificial breeding regime for Southern Bluefin Tuna on March 4, 2008.

During the First Stakeholders Meeting held in Brussels on 22 March 2007 fish breeding challenges for the future were defined by Hervé Chavanne from Istituto Lazzaro Spallanzani. Hervé defined the current focus of breeding activities as growth, fillet quality, external appearance, sexual maturity, processing traits and disease resistance.

Hervé defined the emerging challenges as:

• Include new traits in the selection indexes
• Develop robust animals suited to farming conditions
• Reduce the environmental impact of farming
• Raise the public awareness of breeding practices
• Integrate genomic tools in new selection strategies
• Appraise genetic gain through benchmarking

The Aquabreeding project involves 6 industrial representatives and 5 research organisations representing the major European aquaculture species. The Aquabreeding website includes an array of excellent resources including recent information on breeding and genetics for the major fish species farmed in Europe.

The species reviews provide breeding information and give an overview of knowledge gaps for each major species in order to define industrial research priorities. Typically 10 -14 pages, the species reviews provide state of the art of breeding and reproduction for major aquaculture species. Each review contains a list of references. The species covered by the reviews include: Atlantic Salmon, Rainbow Trout, Seabream, Seabass, Common Carp, Charrs, Atlantic Cod, Brown Trout, Turbot, Tilapia, Wrasse and Sturgeon.

People interested in the work conducted through this project can sign up to receive additional information as the project progresses.

Hervé’s presentation from March 2007 may be viewed here.

In considering the future of aquaculture the work of Pål Lader from SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture (Norway) is a must read.

In an article entitled 2020: An Aquaculture Odyssey in Gemini Magazine Pål sketches out what the future of the aquaculture industry could look like.

Free-range farmed fish. Sea cages that sail off and deliver their fish by themselves. Large autonomous fish farms that float unmoored in the sea. This could be the aquaculture of the future, the article states in a well argued scenario of what the future could look like.

When not casting his mind forward to design the aquaculture systems of the future Pål is a researcher for Norwegian Science Agency SINTEF with expertise in understanding the load bearing capacity of various types of aquaculture structures.

Significant work is under way on food integrity and biosecurity issues.

Information on the scope of work and research and development that is proceeding through the Australian Rural Industries Research and Development Corporations is available here.

Please help us add more relevant information resources by leaving a reply below.

A unique form of genetic fingerprinting for salmon is being used to:

• increase weight gain performance
• increase resistance to amoebic gill disease
• reduce the incidence of early maturation
• improved carcase characteristics

The fin-clipping exercise is unique among selective breeding programs worldwide. The tiny fin samples are used to ‘DNA fingerprint’ each fish and determine its family tree. Without this capability, the 140 salmon families produced each year would have to be kept in separate tanks until large enough to tag, an expensive exercise that would subject the families to different ‘nursery’ conditions, making it difficult to compare their performance.

Tiny fin samples are used to ‘DNA fingerprint’ each fish and determine its family tree. The Wayatinah tag team recorded a ten-fold difference in the weights of the young salmon. With 30–40 per cent of this variation attributable to genetic rather than environmental factors, this encouraging finding suggests great performance gains can be made by breeding from the best bloodlines.

Progeny from the breeding program will be provided by Saltas to Tasmanian salmon growers as smolt for commercial production, and to hatcheries as eggs and young fish (to smolt stage) for growing into broodstock.

Additional information about the program is available here.

I find that one of the most useful tools for helping to prioritise the most important innovations required into the future in any industry is to start by looking at some of the major changes facing that industry. Any change can result in a shift in customer satisfaction with present solutions thus leading to a potential opening for new and innovative solutions.

Some of the main changes impacting Aquaculture include:

• a shift from a production driven approach to a market driven approach with emphasis on the whole supply chain from producer to consumer
• increased globalisation resulting in greater competitive pressures, growing power of trans-national companies especially in food industry research, processing and marketing
• an exacting range of demands by consumers including product consistency, reliability of supply, food safety, product choice, and more recently, sustainability of production
• a revolution in technologies applied to aquaculture including genetic manipulation of plants and animals, precision farming and information management —this involves a trend to patented input systems
• the development of an industrialised system of aquaculture with increased vertical integration, a systems approach to aqua-industries and implementation of industry-wide quality assurance
• continuing increase in mechanisation and capital intensity
• concern for the environment, especially the issues of water quality and degradation, air quality and climate change
• reduction in the number of mainstream commercial farms, increasing farm size
• an increase in the ‘critical mass’ for aquaculture required to support up-to-date infrastructure, information systems, processing, reliable year-round supply capacity and marketing

Is the list complete? Can you help by proposing other important changes?

Meeting the challenge of filling the fish production gap will require that aquaculture adopt ‘intensive’ production methodologies. Several industries have managed to successfully achieve this transition - one of these is the chicken meat industry. Although many of the issues that will need to be faced by the aquaculture industry will be different from chicken meat industry, there will also many that are a similar.

What is certain is that if we are to fill the fish production gap, the aquaculture industry will need to make the transition to chicken meat industry productivity and quality benchmarks in 10% of the time that the chicken industry took to achieve them. This means that aquaculture will need to have achieved the chicken meat industry metrics inside five years.

On a global scale the annual production of broiler meat is 40.5 million metric tonnes derived from approximately 48 billion birds. This volume of production is close to the projected 2030 fish production gap.

Australia’s chicken meat industry has grown from a scattered and informal adjunct to egg production into a major industry with assets in excess of $6 billion, and a turnover of $3.6 billion over the past fifty years. The industry generates 120,000 jobs through the economy, this figure including nearly 40,000 people in direct employment by the industry. Chicken meat consumption per capita in 2002/03 was 33.8kg rising to 36.5kg in 2005/06. It is poised to replace beef as the most popular meat of Australian consumers. Consumption has increased 27% over the past decade, and is expected to continue increasing at between 1-5% pa for at least the next five years. Production in 2002/03 was around 650,000 tonnes of chicken meat from 420 million birds processed. Approximately 98% of the total output goes to the domestic market. The relative price of chicken meat has fallen consistently over the past few decades, due largely to automation of processing, genetic improvements in the birds used and enlightened on-farm feeding and management practices.

Information on the current development priorities for the chicken meat industry plan can be reviewed here.