As interest in land-based aquaculture production increases, recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) are becoming more numerous, more sophisticated, and more complex – especially operations planning large-scale production of market-sized marine fish.
Danish technology company Blue Unit is working to alleviate the issues that complexity can cause through technology, Blue Unit Founder and CTO David Owen said. Blue Unit is a tech company that has developed a "Blue Unit Lab Station" that features hardware covering multiple points of data to provide insights to RAS farms.
RAS has a long history of being used in freshwater environments – for fish such as trout, eel, and smolts – but it is still early days for seawater RAS, Owen said. Seawater-based systems pose greater challenges and operational risks, and depend on a fine balance of water chemistry, fish biology, and close attention to fish health.
Because water quality directly impacts fish health, welfare, and growth performance, careful monitoring is key to avoiding issues that could lead to mass mortalities and serious financial loss, such as those experienced by Atlantic Sapphire in Florida in March 2021.
According to Owen, more widespread application of centralized sensor solutions and improved alarm systems based on gradients rather than raw data are vital to the future success of the industry, and machine learning and artificial intelligence are key to creating smarter farms.
Blue Unit specializes in water-quality management for RAS and other closed fish farms, and Owen said he has spent the last 10 years developing centralized water-quality monitoring systems and improving data implementation. His aim is to keep up with a new generation of data-fueled fish-farming that needs high-quality data in order for operational adjustments to be made in real-time.
“If RAS farms are to achieve optimal performance, then decision-making needs to be based on data, and data collection [needs] to have a much greater influence on design and operational capability,” Owen said in a release.
RAS farms are made up of many large and expensive components – including fish tanks, drum filters, biofilters, and degassers – and if any part of the equipment or technology malfunctions due to error, ineffective design or assembly, or poor management an accumulation of toxic gases in the water can quickly have fatal consequences, Owen said.
“In the RAS business, there’s a tendency to design farms out of assumptions gained from practical experience rather than raw data," Owen said. "For example, degassers are usually dimensioned according to carbon dioxide removal rate, but it’s naive to presume that carbon dioxide alone influences the function of a degasser. There is a myriad of parameters at stake."
Blue Unit has worked with international clients to evaluate the most-effective way to help them optimize RAS performance, and Owen said he believes that the latest system, which constantly monitors 12 vital parameters from up to a dozen different locations on a fish farm, is top of its class.
“Our Blue Unit Lab Station can tell where, when, and why there is a change in water quality long before an individual sensor can measure that change,” he said. “As a result, RAS farmers can optimize water quality and create a more stable growing environment for their fish, which in turn results in a significant increase in welfare, performance, and profitability.”
Photo courtesy of Blue Unit
