Developments in Aquaculture that are Worth Following

Aquaculture's need for aquatech has spawned investment opportunities in startups designed to solve some of the industry's most pressing issues.

FREMONT, CA: Aquaculture is one of the most rapidly expanding food production methods globally and the expanding area of the livestock business. On a $140 billion market, seafood and aquaculture technology startups generated $193 million in 2016, a 271 percent increase from the previous two years combined. The most recent advances in agtech might originate in water and be referred to as "aquatech."

Despite this, numerous segments of this industry are in severe need of innovation. Today, I will concentrate on my top five priorities: illness prevention, vaccine distribution, fish meal replacement, sustainability solutions (including closed-loop agriculture), and supply chain management.

Those interested in investing in the solutions to these problems have a tremendous opportunity right now. Let's examine some identified essential areas and how various forward-thinking organizations address them.

Health promotion: Aquaculture is vitally dependent on disease prevention. Animals and plants are increasingly stressed and susceptible to disease due to changing ocean temperatures and water quality. Yet, disease preventive innovation is sparse in comparison to land-based agriculture. Farmers of terrestrial food animals have access to dozens of vaccines and preventative measures, whereas aquaculture has fewer options and considerable delivery hurdles (more on this below). Vaccines are still delivered manually, and many infestations lack effective preventive measures.

For example, sea lice infestations are widespread and severe in farmed salmon. While migrating salmon shed sea lice when they reach freshwater, farmed salmon are confined in saltwater, and the parasites multiply, causing physical harm and exposure to bacterial diseases. Existing and historical scaling strategies have undesired effects. Hydrogen peroxide, for instance, strains the salmon. Adding a lice-killing benzoate to feed produces hazardous waste, and lice are developing resistance to the therapy, necessitating greater doses. "Dips" in freshwater or warm water exacerbate stress. There are few potential options for sustainable innovation to address the enormous sea lice problem. These include using "cleaner fish" such as Ballan wrasse to graze on sea lice in aquaculture pens, physical barriers or "skirts," and feed supplements to enhance natural resistance to infection. This sector is in dire need of practical, scalable, and efficient innovation.

Farmers must also find strategies to prevent infections such as the white spot syndrome virus (WSSV), which substantially negatively impacts shrimp cultivated in captivity. For instance, probiotics can boost the health and immunity of shrimp. RNA interference (RNAi) is now being examined by several well-established and up-and-coming companies. However, there is still more research and effort on the subject of marine viruses, and the more we learn about how to combat these viruses, the more accessible these treatments will become.

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Oral administration of vaccinations: Oral distribution of vaccinations as an alternative to labor-intensive hand injections, when each animal is given a vaccine individually, is a promising advance in disease prevention. Some progress has been made with the development of mechanical injection devices, although handling stress remains an issue. Oral administration would be advantageous in terms of efficiency and usability and is acceptable for fish of all ages and sizes (manual injection treatment is not). It decreases fish handling and damage, may be used repeatedly as fish mature and has the potential to be less expensive while reducing death rates.

Research into oral delivery systems is paving the way for advancements, including the capacity to administer medications to fish of various sizes and ages. Better delivery options include micro-encapsulation, in which a coating wraps tiny particles or droplets to make miniature capsules, and bio-encapsulation, medications are incorporated into living host organisms and then fed to fish. In this field, it is possible to produce innovative vaccines designed for oral delivery systems, such as subunit and nucleic acid vaccines.