Projects

Towards the Digital Salmon: From a reactive to a pre-emptive research strategy in aquaculture (DigiSal)

Salmon farming in the future must navigate conflicting and shifting demands of sustainability, shifting feed prices, disease, and product quality. The industry needs to develop a flexible, integrated basis of knowledge for rapid response to new challenges. Project DigiSal will lay the foundations for a Digital Salmon: an ensemble of mathematical descriptions of salmon physiology, combining ...

A fundamental and enduring challenge for ecosystem managers developing risk and impact assessment tools is to predict the extent of impact that spilled oil can have on the immediate fish populations and on future generations. Modelling approaches are important tools for these assessments, but they currently suffer from two major shortcomings: 1) the failure to acknowledge that effects can be transferred through several generations and 2) the assumption that a small group of toxic compounds, ...

Salmon farmed on modern feeds contains less of the healthy, long-chain fatty acids (EPA and DHA) than before. Up until the turn of the millennium, farmed salmon were fed fish oil as a replacement for their omega-3 rich natural prey. However, fish oil is now a scarce resource, and more than half of the fat in modern feeds comes from plant oils that are inexpensive, but devoid of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. How can we increase the omega-3 content of salmon on sustainable feeds?

One option is ...