The environmental impacts of aquaculture are often in the spotlight. The need for sustainable practices is now firmly embedded in the minds of the public, governments and industry – but this sometimes presents trade-offs in fish welfare.
Ananda Arrieta is helping to pioneer the use of bioremediation in Australia's aquaculture sector and sees her work as an essential part of the evolution of land-based aquaculture systems.
Stolt Sea Farm is already one of the leading flatfish farming companies in the West – producing over 7,000 tonnes of turbot and sole in sustainable land-based facilities – and it has ambitious plans to expand.
Yasmin Abdullah is a researcher at the Fish Farming and Technology Institute at Suez Canal University and also works in one of Egypt’s largest national aquaculture projects.
Although the $4 billion giant river prawn (Macrobrachium ronsebergii) sector has largely stagnated over the last decade, new breeding programmes could help pave the way for its resurgence.
Stronger and larger aquaculture units and enclosed set ups could be the next stage of aquatech, according to a review of Norway’s development license scheme for Atlantic salmon.
While the oceans are still hugely efficient at producing bivalves such as mussels and oysters, it would be complacent not to consider a future when producing them in urban environments had its merits.
A commercial-scale, modular, stacked aquaculture system that’s capable of producing between 50 tonnes of shrimp a year with minimum human intervention is set to be operational in Singapore in 2023.
As land-based and RAS facilities proliferate, they need a way to address their waste footprint. “Circular aquaculture” could be the way forward – but should producers rely on bacteria, algae or biogas to achieve circularity?
