Signal 2: Smart fish farming
As sea farms around the world scramble to keep up pace with enormous seafood demand, aquaculture looks set to win the race for satisfying this growing appetite for seafood. Today, aquaculture — broadly defined as farming of aquatic organisms — supplies more than half the seafood consumed globally and the surge in its market size is showing no signs of letting up. However, recently, threats looming over local environments of fish farms, in tandem with economical considerations of running aquaculture, have started to tease this exploding market.
Strategically located in this niche, we find a very innovative start-up called Aquabyte. Aquabyte is introducing a fusion of Machine Learning/AI and fish farming in a solution that aims to solve nearly half a dozen problems in one fell swoop. By grooming AI software and utilizing computer vision technology in fish farming, it is planning to minimize waste and improve saving, help combat the threats of sea lice by providing reliable lice counts and optimize fish feed and consumption by constantly releasing fish biomass estimation.
Nevertheless, as meaningful and environmentally sound as this solution by Aquabyte appears to be, extricating this intuitive solution from the negative impacts surrounding aquaculture in general could go a long way toward making this novelty in fish farming a universally accepted phenomena. Intense aquaculture cultivation for species with high commercial value has been seen to cause substantial damage to certain habitats and is known to drive locals from their communities in the aftermath of large-scale land grabbing attempts.
