Aquafarm and hatchery managers continually make decisions regarding fish health, how to increase yields and lower overall production costs. Water quality management is an essential tool to any aquaculture operation and is affected by variables that can drastically affect fish health and production procedures. Aquasend®, an enterprise of Precision Measurement Engineering, recently conducted product pilot programs at three aquaculture farms with varying goals to help farmers monitor their water quality and collect data in real-time.
Two farms were in California with a third farm on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The goals of the deployments varied from measuring dissolved oxygen and temperature to establishing optimal feeding windows, to collecting data to determine if water quality was reaching levels to sustain the reintroduction of aqua farming.
One deployment successfully alerted farmers of a pond’s dissolved oxygen crash resulting from a failed aerator. Dissolved oxygen levels hit a life-threatening number of .08mg/L followed by an excessive amount of liquid oxygen pumped into the water causing a sharp increase to 20mg/L. Farmers quickly responded to both drastic changes alerted by the Aquasend Beacon® bringing the water to safe levels preventing fish kills and saving money.
Monitoring the oxygen and temperature levels of tanks, raceways and ponds in real-time can provide essential data to enhance fish health, increase yields and alert managers before losing product, as well as decrease labor costs. Other benefits include determining optimum biomass capacity, decreasing energy costs and conducting site evaluations. I will discuss site pilot deployment goals, testing parameters and data collection results. I will also discuss how the Beacon® connects to an online portal that can be accessed from any device and will send alerts instantly if the temperature or dissolved oxygen levels drop. Finally, I will review data points throughout the pilot programs via the online interface.