Aquaticode, the developer of an AI-powered fish-sorting system, has debuted a new product it has dubbed AquaLens, which it said can detect deformed juvenile fish in fish hatcheries.
The company said a single AquaLens system, which is initially targeted toward sea bass and sea bream, can sort 350,000 fish in a day. Currently, sorting is often done by teams of 15 to 30 people and is a necessary step for hatcheries as many buyers have strict limits on deformities in hatchlings.
“Every sea bass and sea bream hatchery already sorts out deformed fish. The only question is whether it’s done by people or by a machine,” Aquaticode CEO Stian Rognlid said in a release. “A good grader can spot a deformed jaw or spine. But, people slow down when a batch is full of deformed fish, and they don’t grade the same at the end of a shift as at the start. AquaLens keeps its pace and its criteria from the first fish to the last.”
Aquaticode said the new technology scans fish from multiple angles and can assess deformities, health, and weight in real time. It also detects deformities with close to 100 percent accuracy and can then sort them into commercial and non-commercial fish.
Aquaticode said AquaLens works on fish from 1 gram to 10 grams in size, helping solve issues before companies spend money and effort raising a commercially non-viable fish.
Aquaticode said its new tech is built on the infrastructure of SORTpro, a gender-sorting system for farmed salmon that it trialed in 2023 and was later adopted by Australis and AquaChile.
“We’ve done this in salmon. Now, we’re doing it in bass and bream, and other species will follow,” Rognlid said.
The company said the new AquaLens technology follows its agreement with major sea bass and sea bream producer Ilknak in April, in which AquaLens will phenotype and sort 300 million sea bass and sea bream.
