The growth and industrialization seen in global aquaculture production the recent decades have resulted in increasing biomasses and numbers of fish that need to be handled and cared for. Despite rapid innovation in knowledge and technology, disease and environmental footprint remain bottlenecks for sustainable growth. Animal health and welfare, production efficiency and cost are all key performance indicators. Vaccination has a positive effect on all of these by improving health, survival, growth performance and product quality. Vaccines also lessen the environmental impact by reducing or replacing the need for therapeutic intervention and by increasing the overall production efficiency.
Today the most common method of vaccination is injection of oil-based vaccines into the abdominal cavity. Success depends not only on product efficacy but also on proper delivery to the fish. Injection can be done either manually using hand-held syringes or automatically by machine. The choice of method depends on fish numbers, farm infrastructure and economical aspects such as labor cost and ability to invest. In the salmon industry automation has gradually replaced manual vaccination, and close to 90% of the fish is currently injected by machines in Norway. For species such as European sea bass and tilapia manual vaccination is still by far most common, but the interest in automation is growing. Today there is a limited but increasing selection of machines available for the Tilapia market. These range from simple machines that inject one vaccine in a pre-set injection point, to machines capable of delivering multiple vaccines simultaneously with automatic adjustment of the injection point, and that sorts the fish by size after vaccination. One machine operated by 2-3 staff may inject up to 8-9 000 fish per hour, equivalent to the capacity of 8 experienced vaccinators. It will not get tired after a long day, and it delivers high and consistent quality of injection.
Vaccination machines were introduced for the first time to tilapia in Brazil in August 2021, one has been through a steep learning phase, and several large producers are now successfully using the technology. This presentation will, with a practical perspective, review experiences and highlight obstacles and key success factors for introduction of automatic vaccination in tilapia farming.