Growth in the aquaculture sector has been accelerated by new technologies that enable farmers to operate more efficiently. However, the impacts of climate change are introducing new challenges to ocean farmers including, increasing global sea surface temperatures, increasing incidence and severity of hypoxia and more intense and frequent precipitation events, storms, and heat waves often leading to more serve harmful algae blooms. Each of these impacts present operational challenges that farmers must navigate to protect their livestock and must overcome to ensure they are working toward more efficient and sustainable production cycles.
Despite these challenges, both industry and scientific researchers are working on novel technologies that are helping farmers better manage their sites. Higher water temperatures reduce the capacity of water to hold oxygen and increase fish’s metabolic demands. Many farmers face low oxygen conditions in the summer season, particularly when fish are close to harvest size. In response to this, many sites have invested in substantial aeration and oxygenation injection systems that can provide life support to fish to ensure oxygen levels remain above a viable threshold. Not only this but there is an increasing trend in the number of semi-enclosed systems that require oxygen injection to provide a suitable habitat for fish. Producers are quickly realizing that these new technologies allow them to not only provide suitable habitat but by super saturating the environment with oxygen they can shorten grow-out cycles. These technologies are not only being applied to improve water quality but in the management of harmful algae that can cause major health issues and mortalities on farms.
Oxygen injection and aeration systems are a significant investment and can be very costly to operate – in particular, against harmful phytoplankton where systems can often be left running round-the-clock to protect against unknown threats. Automated and data-controlled mitigation systems are the future of this technology to ensure that systems are operating at the highest efficiency level and only when necessary. To achieve this, farms must adopt widescale environmental monitoring for individual pen control and continue to digitize operational farm metadata that can be fed into algorithms to achieve smart control systems.