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The interaction between fish farm induced environmental change and fish health in intensive mariculture

Obiettivo

The principal aims of the research are to quantify the relationships amongst farm design, husbandry practice, hydrography and ecological change and assess the potential for ecological change to affect the health of fish farmed in marine waters and hence influence the long term viability of fish farm sites. A secondary aim is the development of guidelines and models which will allow an assessment of the degree of ecological change and the production potential of specific sites to be made.
Continuous ventilation of the fish cages by a steady current allows high levels of oxygenation and effective flushing of soluble waste products. There is no evidence of high levels of ammonia in marine cages but suboptimal levels of oxygen were frequently observed. These occurred during prolonged periods of low current speeds.

A steady current regime disperses the waste solid materials away from the immediate vicinity of the cages thus reducing the environmental impact on the benthos and allows greater oxygen stability within the cages.

A shallow site where the sediment is regularly scoured by high current speeds may be better than a deeper site with a less favourable current regime. A poorly flushed shallow site is, however, likely to have a very limited holding capacity and may give rise to the production of hydrogen sulphide in close proximity to the fish.

The relationships between fish health and benthic impact are less clear. Hydrogen sulphide is evolved from heavily impacted sediments and is toxic to fish. The relationship between benthic impact and gill damage has not been very well reflected in growth or mortality data and hydrogen sulphide has never been detected within fish cages.

Experiments on the response of salmon to chronic sublethal levels (7.8 mM) of hydrogen sulphide showed a relatively rapid (2 to 6 weeks) deterioration in gill tissues followed by slow but progressive repair and little effect on growth. Liver tissues showed increasing degeneration with continued exposure.

The response of salmon to single doses of high (21.5 mM and 29.5 mM) but sublethal levels of hydrogen sulphide showed that it is likely that the majority of the fish exposed to either level would eventually die or have severely compromised health.

Finally, a series of guidelines have been proposed which may help fish farmers avoid many of the fish health problems associated with environmental change at fish farm sites.
The project will be based on a coordinated programme of field and laboratory work and will be divided into a series of phases which overlap to ensure that the field and laboratory studies will be fully integrated.

Phase 1 of the work will be carried out to determine threshold levels of water quality parameters which have the potential to cause stress and induce pathological change and histological damage to fish farmed in marine waters.

The aims of Phase 2 are to investigate the ways in which cage design, husbandry and the hydrography of the site interact to affect those water quality parameters studied in Phase 1.

Phase 3 is designed to assess the changes in water quality parameters measured at the field sites in the context of the effects of such changes on the health of the fishes.

Throughout the project attempts will be made to use the data to formulate simple models which could be used as an aid to the assessment of the degree of ecological change and predict the optimum production which could be sustained at a given site. This is Phase 4.

Campo scientifico (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifica i progetti con EuroSciVoc, una tassonomia multilingue dei campi scientifici, attraverso un processo semi-automatico basato su tecniche NLP. Cfr.: https://op.europa.eu/it/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Coordinatore

Scottish Association of Marine Science
Contributo UE
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Indirizzo
Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory
PA34 4AD Oban
Regno Unito

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