Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) on Wednesday unveiled a fully-automated fry nursery that it claims can breed 10 times as much fish with 60 percent less manpower compared to traditional methods.
A cross-department team led by Chen Tzong-yueh (???), dean of NCKU's Department of Biotechnology and Bioindustry Sciences, announced the creation of the computer-aided indoor fish farming system after three years of development.
According to NCKU, the internet-connected system uses data collection and feedback to detect the size of fry and feed them with the correct size of algae or feed such as rotifers, brine shrimp and copepods.
The pilot "smart system for cultivating fry," the first of its kind in Taiwan, is installed on the university's Annan campus.
Its developers said they have already used it to breed grouper. The system could give commercial fish farms the option of moving outdoor fry nurseries into more stable temperature-controlled indoor facilities in order to increase yields, they said.
The system's innovations saw it recognized by the 2021 Future Tech Awards in September, which were jointly hosted by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education, Academia Sinica, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
The system allows every step in fries into adult fish to be fully automated, according to its developers, as well as reliably achieve a breeding rate of 3-5 percent in a process that sees fries grow into fish of 1-2 inches.
The breeding rate was over 10 times the 0.3 percent achieved in traditional breeding process, NCKU said.
At the same time, a single person can manage three to four tanks simultaneously with NCKU's system using phone monitoring, which reduces manpower by 60 percent.
NCKU also attributed the large rise in breeding rate to the possibility of relocating a fish farm indoors, explaining that it even enables a new worker to work smoothly inside a hi-tech facility rain or shine.
The university said its innovative system could help alleviate the twin problems of an aging workforce and an acute labor shortage faced by Taiwan's fish farming industry.
NCKU added that it had signed a technology transfer agreement with a photoelectricity company, with three others expected to follow suit.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel