An important part of the blue bioeconomy is to optimize animal welfare while improving the performance and product quality of fish in aquaculture.
In SensoFiA, tools, products and methods are being developed to directly monitor the health and stress response of fish in aquaculture. Massive advances in production performance and product quality are possible via improvements in fish welfare based on new valid stress detection methods in recirculating aquaculture systems (KLA) and net cages. SensoFia contributes to optimized production and sustainable utilization of aquatic biomass because animal-friendly fish production optimizes yields.
Animal welfare is also increasingly relevant for the end consumer. The intensive production of fish as a foodstuff in aquacultures in particular must therefore be constantly optimized at all process levels, right through to slaughter, in order to ensure safe, approvable and legally sound production.
Comprehensive innovative biomonitoring contributes to this.
Optimal animal husbandry results in an improvement of all performance-related parameters. In the case of Atlantic salmon aquaculture, the two-phase life cycle also plays a prominent role: while the juveniles are raised in land-based facilities (increasingly also KLA) until smoltification, the later life stages grow in net cages in the open sea or fjord. SensoFiA therefore focuses on the development of suitable measurement and analysis methods that are capable of correctly recording different influencing variables and their different time-limited duration and intensity of influence, and of issuing corresponding recommendations for action for aquaculture management that support the value-determining properties of the product and animal welfare as a whole.
In close cooperation with the sister project BioFiA, an interdisciplinary knowledge gain on improved husbandry conditions for fish in aquacultures will be achieved.
