Fish farming is massive enterprise – the business now produces about 100 million tonnes a yr – and with salmon costs hovering, producers are turning to lasers, automation and synthetic intelligence to spice up manufacturing and minimize prices.

How are you aware if farmed salmon have had sufficient to eat?

Effectively, based on Lingalaks fish farms in Norway, which produce almost three million salmon annually, the fish make much less noise as soon as the feeding frenzy is over.

The agency is aware of this because of a brand new hydro-acoustic system it has put in at certainly one of its farms. The system listens to the salmon sloshing loudly about as they feed in a cluster. When the fish have had sufficient, they swim off and the noise lessens.

Lingalaks chief govt Erlend Haugarvoll hopes this data will save his agency a number of cash in diminished feed, as a lot of it at present will get wasted.

“I feel it may enhance [expenditure] by about 5%,” he says. “That could possibly be between 7m-10m krone (£630,000-900,000, $900,000-$1.3m) for our agency.”

The system, developed by tech agency CageEye, has taken years to develop, says chief govt Bendik Sovegjarto.

“It isn’t like a pellet detector,” Mr Sovegjarto says, which observes the variety of fish meals pellets left within the water.

“When you do not see any pellets, you may’t be sure if it is as a result of the fish are full or that you are looking within the mistaken place due to the water currents.”

Utilizing audio knowledge from the caged salmon is extra correct and will save Norwegian fish farms 1bn krone (£90m,$130m) a yr in un-gobbled feed, believes Mr Sovegjarto.

The expertise has been developed with the assistance of Ole Folkedal, at the Institute of Marine Research, in Bergen. He has monitored salmon feeding patterns and different knowledge, corresponding to water temperature and oxygen ranges, and that is giving scientists and farmers new insights into the elements influencing how a lot the fish need to eat.

“You’ve gotten enormous variations in how a lot to feed day-after-day,” says Mr Folkedal.

He provides that the info can be utilized to function fully automated feeding techniques, with people merely overseeing the method.

The rise of synthetic intelligence applied sciences like these, which make choices about when feeding ought to cease and begin, is about to make massive modifications to the profitable business of salmon farming.

There are different hi-tech approaches to automated fish monitoring, too.

For instance, one start-up, Aquabyte, lately raised $three.5m (£2.5m) for a system that makes higher use of current video surveillance knowledge.

Many fashionable fish farms already use video cameras to watch the salmon of their cages, says Aquabyte founder and chief govt Bryton Shang.

“They stick CCTV within the pens and have operators off website watching the fish and figuring out how a lot to feed,” he explains.

“We take the pictures from the CCTV and use pc imaginative and prescient algorithms [instead].”

With this strategy, computer systems fastidiously monitor the group of feeding fish visually. The system can also be designed to look out for a perennially problematic customer to fish farms – the parasitic sea louse.

Lice connect to salmon and eat them, inflicting harm that may be deadly. The lice may make the fish inedible for people.

Mr Shang hopes his expertise will assist farmers detect sea lice in order that they will then be eliminated manually.

However even lice removing could possibly be automated sooner or later.

Stingray has give you a self-guided device that fires lasers on the lice to destroy them.

“The louse is hit with a deadly outcome, and coagulates inside milliseconds,” boasts the corporate’s web site. In the meantime the de-loused salmon, because of its mirror-like pores and skin that displays the laser, swims off unhurt.

It is maybe no shock that salmon farmers are turning to hi-tech options – the business is definitely a rich one.

Fish farms are worth nearly 50bn krone (£four.6, $6.four) to the Norwegian financial system, and this yr the nation is predicted to see growth of 9% in farmed salmon production.

Norwegian fish firm Salmar’s gigantic offshore set up, Ocean Farm 1, is a 110m-wide (120 yards) cage able to containing 1.5 million fish.

London-based Hemang Rishi, co-founder of Observe Applied sciences, says his agency is growing expertise that may visually monitor feeding in salmon cages.

“We’re simply deploying our first product on website for an prolonged time period in Chile, the place they’ve the second largest salmon market on the earth after Norway,” he says.

And in Florida, a agency referred to as Atlantic Sapphire is hoping to assemble an enormous salmon farm – on land.

The idea entails water swirled mechanically in giant tanks to offer fish the phantasm that they’re nonetheless at sea.

It isn’t laborious to think about extremely automated fish farms of the longer term, wherein people have little or no to do.

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“My prediction is that autonomous techniques will do a lot of the jobs in future years,” says Mr Folkedal.

Nonetheless, he notes that present laws in Norway imply that, for now a minimum of, farmed fish should be manually checked recurrently for indicators of sickness and mortalities.

However lots of the duties farmers should carry out every day – corresponding to counting and measuring fish – are tedious, and could possibly be automated as soon as machines turn into correct sufficient, Mr Folkedal believes.

“That is one thing that the farmers actually need,” he says.

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