Aquaculture

So far as feedstocks for the production of biofuels go, kelp is a highly promising one on many fronts, and a new technology promises to boost its credentials even further by maximizing its exposure to both sunlight and nutrients.

It's important for fish farmers to keep track of the number of fish in their pens, but doing so involves going in and actually netting out some of the fish. According to new research, echo-sounding tech could soon serve as an easier alternative.

How hungry are your salmon? It's an important question in aquaculture, and by using a combination of audio sensors and artificial intelligence, the Smart System for Feeding Control (SICA) offers a new way to answer it.

While ocean-based fish farms do help take pressure off of wild stocks, they have eco-unfriendly drawbacks of their own. A new underwater robot is being designed to address that situation, by autonomously inspecting the fish and their pens.

Although ingesting nutrients in tablet form is better than nothing, nutrients are best absorbed if they're part of the foods we eat. With that in mind, scientists have created a supplement for shellfish that boosts their nutritional content.

In recent years, fish farms have increasingly started using underwater ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) for cleaning the nets that enclose their fish pens. A relatively new one, the StealthCleaner, has a unique triangular form factor.

Marine aquaculture pens have to be regularly checked for holes, plus the fish need to be inspected for parasites. And although the job is typically performed by human divers, it turns out that a robotic sea turtle may be a better choice for the task.

It's vitally important to monitor the water quality of fish farms, as problems such as pollution can quickly prove disastrous. A small new floating cube was designed with this in mind, as it continuously tracks multiple factors.

​Killing up to 200,000 people annually, schistosomiasis is one of THE most deadly parasitic diseases in the world, second only to malaria. Soon, however, prawn aquaculture could be used to control the snails that spread it – and to provide revenue for people in developing nations.

​Sea lice infestations are a common problem in salmon farms, and while there are chemical-free ways of getting the parasites off the fish, they're kind of rough. A new device is being put through one such delousing process, in order to measure just how hard it is on the salmon.

​Among the criticisms of salmon farms are the facts that non-native fish can escape into the local marine environment, plus the farmed fish may become infected with parasites that spread to wild populations. A new type of salmon pen, however, is designed to address those problems.

​Although salmon are known to be a good source of healthy omega-3 fatty acids, farmed fish typically contain much less of them than their wild counterparts. Norwegian scientists are working on a solution to that problem, in the form of fish feed made from a genetically-engineered plant.