AEFishBIT: A smart device for monitoring fish health and welfare

Abstract

To meet the increasing global demand of fish protein, aquaculture production is becoming more intensified, which requires the selection of non-aggressive individuals that perform well at high densities. Indeed, fish with high stress resilience are less susceptible to diseases, show better growth performance, and provide a better-quality product. In the other hand, animal health and welfare issues are of increasing public concern, and livestock industries and aquaculture in particular require to project a welfare-friendly image of their products. It is thereby important to encompass the development of aquaculture with novel and stricter criteria of welfare for the simultaneous improvement of the productivity and the welfare of group-housed animals. With the advent of new technologies, it is becoming relatively easy to integrate insights from the environment, microbial loads, and fish behaviour and appearance. Behavioural indicators are becoming especially useful for alerting farmers that something is potentially wrong before significant welfare issues and mortality occur. The challenge is that very often behavioural indicators are difficult to quantify in the aquatic environment and proper assessment of fish welfare often requires additional physiological measurements. Moreover, these analysis becomes tedious and laborious. Therefore, to turn quantitative behavioural analysis into practical operational welfare indicators, technological advances on machine vision, biotelemetry and miniaturized bio-loggers need to be applied and adapted to the demand of fish welfare monitoring. The above reasons led to the design of AEFishBIT, a small data storage Tag for a reliable underscore of welfare in fish exposed to different aquaculture stressors. This device was designed and validated for the individual and simultaneous monitoring of physical activity and gill ventilation rates (two in one). This improvement in fish sensing is intended to contribute to associate different activity and behaviour patterns with better performance or differences in stress and disease resilience, emphasizing the importance of the better understanding of the species and genotype-by-environment interactions for the improvement of fish health and welfare.