COVID-19 Information Sources

In order to help you to obtain information about aquaculture and COVID19, we have complied a list of aquaculture media websites that you can check out as many are reporting aquaculture activities relating to COVID19. See list [More..]

The Singapore Aquaculture Industry — Contributing to Singapore’s Food Security

In Singapore, local food fish farms produce around 10 percent of Singapore’s consumption of food fish. As Singapore envisions production of 30 percent of Singapore’s nutritional needs locally by 2030, Singapore’s aquaculture industry needs to transform and adopt technology to raise productivity, strengthen climate resilience and overcome Singapore’s resource constraints. Some farms have already developed innovations such as floating closed containment farming systems and adopted Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions. There is also an increasingly vibrant aquaculture R&D ecosystem that works closely with the industry to develop solutions and address technology gaps in the sector. In solving its own challenges, Singapore has the potential to become a leader in tropical aquaculture technology and develop innovations that can benefit the world. [More..]

Editor's Note - Black Swans and Aquaculture

A Black Swan is an event that is rare, unpredictable and has profound and disruptive impacts, something random with a large deviation from normal. The current global disease pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus is an exemplary Black Swan event. An influential book published in 2007 on the subject of Black Swans, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, was subtitled “the impact of the highly improbable.” In 2012, the US National Intelligence Council published Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds that identified eight Black Swans, with a severe pandemic disease outbreak topping the list. New terms like flattening the infection curve and social distancing have entered popular lexicon. [More..]

The successes of the reinvigoration and the vision for the next four years

The Journal of the World Aquaculture Society (JWAS) is a special publication among the aquaculture literature. It is a scientific journal “devoted to the advancement of technological innovations and solutions to major issues facing the growth of global aquaculture.” It is also a society publication and represents the World Aquaculture Society (WAS) membership and the Society's goals to disseminate high quality information, “focusing on global aquaculture science, growth of aquaculture industries, and development and growth of sustainable aquaculture enterprises of all scales.” The journal must therefore fulfill goals of scientific value and performance as well as satisfy the valid demands of the society membership. [More..]

Abstracts for Aquaculture America 2020 Published

The abstracts being presented for the February 8 - 12 meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii have been published to our website. Please take a moment to review the meeting presentations [More..]

The key role of functional aquafeeds to achieve a more sustainable aquaculture

Aquaculture's unparalleled growth cannot be achieved at the expense of environmental and social responsibilities. Efficient policies and legal frameworks are needed to safeguard sustainable and equitable aquaculture development with generalized and improved socioeconomic benefits to players along the production and value chain.

The need to decrease the dependence on fish meal and fish oil in the formulation of suitable aquafeeds for cultured species (especially marine) has long been recognized by the aquaculture sector. The stagnation of world fisheries, along with the decreasing trend of fish captures destined for non-food uses (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2018), has prompted the aquafeed sector to explore alternative ingredients, either marine or land based. Although this search has often pointed toward a number of alternative protein sources, the sustainability of using such alternative ingredients has often been questioned. For instance, soy-based protein produc [More..]

RAS believers making an early stand on American soil

Domestically produced, fresh Atlantic salmon is hitting the U.S. marketplace. That’s nothing new.

What is new is that these fish aren’t from traditional ocean-based farms. They’re from land-based aquaculture facilities in places most people wouldn’t expect.

For industry insiders, the emergence of land-based aquaculture is not too surprising, seen as a response to demand for Atlantic salmon and locally produced food with a low environmental footprint. Despite the considerable expense to build a suitable facility that can produce fish at commercial scale, two prominent producers are making waves with this market-leading species, recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) and are poised to make an early stand in the United States.

The first RAS producer to bring Atlantic salmon to market did so this past July, when Superior Fresh LLC harvested its first batch at its facility in Northfield, Wisc., a thousand miles from the nearest ocean.
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A perspective of the future value and challenges of genetic engineering in aquaculture

Within the last decade, advancements in genetic engineering technologies have increased the efficiency at which these techniques can be applied in animals, including fish. An animal is considered genetically engineered if its DNA has been intentionally and artificially altered to achieve a specific trait. The most common genetic engineering strategies include transgenics and gene editing, the latter of which likely has the greatest potential to advance the genetics of food production. [More..]

Journal of the World Aquaculture Society Editor's Choice Awards for October 2019

The editors of The Journal of the World Aquaculture Society (JWAS) are pleased to announce the Editor's Choice Awards for the October 2019 issue of JWAS. [More..]

Abstracts for LACQUA19 Published

The abstracts that were presented at the November 19 - 22 meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica have been published to our website. Please take a moment to review the presentations that were given during the meeting. [More..]

The Failure of MUMS and Aquaculture Indexing

For those of us around in the late 1990s and early 2000s as members of the Minor Use and Minor Species (MUMS) coalition, there was probably nothing as significant or important as the effort to change the way we approve drugs and therapeutants for aquaculture animals. Until then all animals were treated the same when it came to getting a label through the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM), including a lengthy and cost-prohibitive approval process. All major species — domestic dogs and cats, cattle, pigs, horses and poultry — have markets large enough to justify the high costs of traditional labeling, but how do you get a drug for a parakeet, an alpaca or a dwarf cichlid? MUMS! [More..]

Journal of the World Aquaculture Society Editor's Choice Awards for August 2019

The editors of The Journal of the World Aquaculture Society (JWAS) are pleased to announce the Editor's Choice Awards for the August 2019 issue of JWAS. [More..]

Climate change: Response and role of global aquaculture

Climate change is a reality and both an immediate and future threat to global food security. A multitude of climatic aberrations are occurring in aquatic and terrestrial environments and are linked to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, much arising from human activity. Altered biotic and abiotic conditions of both terrestrial and marine-based production systems are appearing at a much faster rate than earlier projected. Disruptions in the availability of food derived from these systems are inevitable consequences, and most probably will warrant changes in traditional eating habits of global ethnic populations. [More..]

Asian-Pacific Aquaculture 2019 Highlights

Asian-Pacific Aquaculture 2019 held in Chennai India was a huge success. There were about 3500 attendees to learn from the more than 1000 papers that were presented. There were also 123 companies displaying their products and services in the well attended trade show. Take a few minutes to view the highlights of the meeting.
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Aquaculture in Costa Rica

Costa Rica may be a small country in land area (51,000 km2) but it has abundant freshwater resources from its mountain ranges, a tropical climate, and a marine exclusive economic zone of almost 600,000 km2 that make the country suitable for aquaculture development. Freshwater aquaculture began in the 1960s with the objective of promoting socio-economic development in rural areas by adopting technologies to produce introduced tilapia species Oreochromis mossambicus and Sarotherodon melanopleura (FAO 2016). In the decades that followed, experimental culture of rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss and freshwater prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii was conducted (Galvez and Guenther 1987). Marine aquaculture began in the 1970s with the cultivation of the shrimps Litopenaeus vannamei, L. stylirostris and L. occidentales (FAO 2016, Nanne 1986). [More..]