Meeting summary: Tech x FAW reading group discussion 1: environmental monitoring for aquaculture

[rhjiang]

Thanks to everyone who joined our discussion on environmental monitoring for aquaculture! We were fortunate to have a number of people who are highly knowledgeable in welfare issues in aquaculture, what has been tried, and what ideas are on the horizon. Our discussion laid out many of the core issues that may be tractable. I think further progress could be made on some of these fronts by someone knowledgeable in sensor development.

Our next discussion will be 02/01/2026 10:00 PST /13:00 EST / 18:00 UTC. If you'd like to lead the discussion, please volunteer by 01/07! You can start a post about it, or run your idea by the group chat, or just reach out to me. Since we did aquatic animals today, it would be neat to focus on a land animal next time. Here are topics people have thrown out there.

Here are some notes from today. Please correct me, add to the list, or share lingering thoughts in the comments.

• Basic water quality monitoring is often cost-limited
  • For shrimp farming in India, a rough upper bound for new monitoring equipment is around $200 per pond
  • For species like tilapia or milkfish, even $40 can be too expensive
    • Adoption often requires either proof of economic benefit
  • However, SWP's model where someone else buys the tech may be generalizable
  • We can also consider loans: we buy the monitoring tech for you, and when it raises productivity you can pay us back
• How much you can do to respond to the measurements depends on the size of the system -- more tractable in smaller ponds
• Certification may be a route for pushing welfare monitoring, in some cases
  • Shrimp often seeks certification because it's being exported
  • Salmon is often certified
  • e.g., if cortisol monitoring for fish, or CHH monitoring for shrimp, were viable/scalable, perhaps ASC could require it
  • However, producers have power to push back when certification schemes get more rigorous
  • Verification usually relies on good faith rather than tamper-proof tech
• Welfare indicators/measurement?
  • While many studies emphasize stocking density, dissolved oxygen (DO), and un-ionized ammonia as key drivers of shrimp welfare, the reality in modern farms is messier
    • Often, these parameters are actually pretty well handled, but mortality is still super high
  • Cortisol monitoring for fish
    • FWI has looked into testing cortisol levels in water for salmon, but the environments were too large/open
    • However, increasing numbers of salmon are being farmed in RAS, potentially making this tractable
    • Costs of continuous cortisol monitoring tech may go down because it's being worked on for humans now
  • More science is needed to know what to monitor for shrimp. CHH? Serotonin? Lactate?
    • Potentially RAS farms can be used to do experiments
    • Can shrimp shells, shed during molting, be tested for something that indicates welfare?
  • Testing for welfare at the processing stage (after slaughter)?
    • If doing this in place of continuous/periodic monitoring, you'd want to measure something that is related to life-long wellbeing
      • (e.g. if you just measure current cortisol levels, it'll only reflect recent hours. Slaughter is probably stressful)
      • Would probably only be useful for certification (not real-time enough for farmers to respond to)
  • Tech may have to be highly species-specific. e.g., Tilapia cortisol levels spike very quickly when they're handled
  • What would the actual sensor tech look like?
    • Hormones probably need to be detected via aptasensors. But then again, pregnancy tests detect a hormone via a test strip?
• Aerators (for improving DO levels)
  • SWP in India has prototyped augmenting aerators, adding motors to the paddles, to push air deeper into the pond
  • SWP is interested in adding aerators to the centers of ponds, not just the edges, which would run for a few hours in the morning when DO is lowest
    • (If they ran all the time, this may lead to farmers increasing stocking density)
  • Aeration is not usually used for fish farming in the Philippines/Vietnam
    • DO sensors are also uncommon; they're more expensive than ammonia, etc., at $500+
      • But, maybe you can have an organization buy one sensor and go around measuring various ponds. Even so, these tools are finicky and have calibration issues
    • Fish don't usually die from low DO, but they may suffer
• Hydrogen sulfide
  • Really toxic, causes mass mortalities
  • Comes from waste + uneaten feed
  • Managed by removing sludge, filtering water, or using probiotics to convert it to feed
  • We want it to be monitored, but sensors are ~$9k.
    • From Norway and Germany, but potentially could be produced much cheaper in India
    • Colorimetric test strips tend to not be reliable
• Farmer knowledge is often a bottleneck
  • There may be monitoring improvements they would make, if they were educated on the topic (e.g. ammonia)
  • Many farmers aren't knowledgeable about hydrogen sulfide, or management of it
• Ammonia
  • Scale welfare tried giving colorimetric test strip kits to farmers, but the range was too wide to be sensitive in the relevant range
• Adjacent tech, that might improve welfare if just made cheaper (or made by people who care about welfare)
  • Slaughter equipment, stunners
  • Improved feed for welfare
    • FWI is looking into this
  • Feed delivery
  • Hydrogen sulfide monitors
  • DO sensors
• Future trends
  • People have been saying RAS is going to blow up for decades, but it still struggles to be profitable
  • Most shrimp is farmed in global south, but global north keeps saying they're going to start scaling up
• Nephrop slaughter is a huge welfare issue, though stunners are starting to be adopted, largely for worker welfare (preventing injury)