New tools for online overall assessment of rearing environment, stress level, and fish welfare in Atlantic salmon cage farms

The welfare of farmed fish has received increasing attention in recent years. Fish that thrive grow faster, are less sensitive to stress and less vulnerable to disease. In this project we propose a system for overall monitoring and assessment of rearing environment and fish welfare in sea cages. The system will give a description of the oxygen level and the current of the water outside the sea cage, a detailed description of the rearing environment inside the cage from top to bottom, a registration of th e breathing pattern of selected fish and a profile of the vertical distribution of the population as a whole. Validation of breathing pattern as a stress level and welfare indicator in salmon vill be done. All the measurement systems will be fully automat ic and register data continuously or at pre set intervals. All systems will transfer data via mobile broadband network to a central database and expert system. On receiving new data the expert system evaluates environmental conditions, the welfare of the fish and presents the results to the fish farmer on an easy to understand password protected internet webpage. To increase the accuracy of this assessment we will perform experiments to evaluate how diluted oxygen levels and acute stress influence breath ing pattern. Finally, we will set up the monitoring system at two farm localities in order to test the monitoring equipment and the results from the expert system in a minimum 6 month period at each farm locality.