Non-Invasive Biological Warning Systems: monitoring of farmed fish and environment to improve welfare in aquaculture systems

A commercial salmon sea cage contains a very large number of fish and the size of a sea farm could consist of about ten to twenty units. Monitoring the welfare of this large number of individual animals is challenging. Manual observations and measurements of some environmental variables, and fish health checks are frequently conducted, but as this industry is still expanding, there is a need of reliable sensors systems and more automated and effective procedures for analysis. Effective prevention, control of diseases and non-invasive systems to monitor the welfare of the fish are crucial for sustainable salmon production. This requires the development and the adequate use of sensor systems as a whole for generating data that could be used for reliable and (near) real-time welfare assessment to trigger targeted counter actions if required. The primary objective of BIOWASYS is to identify different parameters that can be used to detect, register and respond to changes in production environments at sea of farmed salmon. The project will also provide new knowledge on: • Innovative non-invasive and automatized fish welfare and health monitoring procedures in relation with production environments. • Spatiotemporal distribution of selected pathogens in relation to the 3D complex environmental conditions inside sea cages and farms. • Relations between variations in the cage environment, pathogen occurrence and fish welfare, which can support the development of early biological warning systems. By providing knowledge on the welfare of fish at shoal level, the 3D complex environmental variables at the farming locations and the distribution of selected pathogens inside the sea cages, the BIOWASYS project will provide new insights of the interaction between all these different parameters, forecast the environmental conditions and facilitate the appropriate use of monitoring tools and the development of novel strategies for production.

Effective prevention, control of diseases and non-invasive systems to monitor the welfare of the fish are crucial for sustainable salmon production. This requires the development and use of sensor systems able to generate heterogeneous datasets that need to be analyzed and interpreted to detect possible patterns that could be used as Operational Welfare Indicators (OWI) to trigger warning actions. The number of individuals per unit in modern fish farms (up to 200 000 fish per cage/tank) renders the use of conventional individual based welfare monitoring methods difficult. There is therefore an industrial need for new sensor systems and more automated and effective procedures for analysis that can provide reliable and continuous insights on how fish welfare on a group level is affected by the production environment. BIOWASYS aims to establish a foundation for a non-invasive biological warning system for fish farming by using behavioural responses to assess welfare impacts of external and internal environmental parameters during production. This will entail acquiring new knowledge on the complex 3D environmental conditions, the spatiotemporal distribution of selected pathogens inside sea cages and farms and data describing their interactions. The project will also seek to identify biological parameters that can be used to detect and register fish responses toward changes in these parameters. The work will therefore also include developing a new non-invasive and automatised fish welfare and health monitoring procedure based on group behaviour analyses. Data acquired with this procedure will finally be correlated with data on the conditions in the cage to unveil how variations in the cage environment, pathogen distribution dynamics and occurrence impacts fish welfare status.