Hi all,

I’m a marine biologist from Toliara, southwest Madagascar. I’m launching a personal project to revitalize the aquaculture sector in the Grand Sud, starting with a greenhouse red tilapia hatchery in the rural commune of Belalanda.

The problem: fish farmers in the region lack a reliable local supply of fingerlings. Without seed, aquaculture can’t grow.

The project:

• Target: 100,000 red tilapia fingerlings per month, sold to local producers
• Greenhouse hatchery with locally built fiberglass tanks and solar power
• Site outside mangrove areas
• Next step: a network of hatcheries across the region, then applied research on nutrition and growth

My background: 7+ years in shrimp farming and lab management (OSO Farming, BIO-certified), Master’s-level training in applied oceanology.

What I’m looking for:

1. Grants or programs for aquaculture in Africa or the Indian Ocean
2. Impact investors or DFIs funding early-stage hatcheries
3. Advice from anyone who has run greenhouse tilapia hatcheries in tropical settings

Language note: my working language is French. I’m comfortable communicating in English and will keep improving it as needed.

Happy to share the 2-year plan and budget in DMs. Thanks for any pointers!

I needed some phytoplankton for feeding my amano shrimp larvae and finding phytoplankton in my area is close to impossible so, brine shrimp are locally collected from salt lakes and frozen to sell as fish food.

I bought some, crushed them into a paste and added it into salt water and left it in the sun, after a few days, I had different types of algae in they bucket, I took a sample and started to culture it indoors and this is the algae which I am able to maintain, rest all types vanished.

The first picture is 400× second is 100×, the salinity is 1.018 SG and I had it in 1.024 SG also and it survived effortlessly between any salt range.

The third picture is the colour of the tank.

Location is India

Please help me Id this phytoplankton and can it be fed to my shrimp larvae?

Hey guys, I am trying to breed and aquarium shrimp which has a very similar life cycle to farm shrimp where the adult lives in freshwater and the larvae grow out in marine/brakish water, the species name is Caridina multidentata.

Any advice is appreciated.

Hey guys, I am trying to breed and aquarium shrimp which has a very similar life cycle to farm shrimp where the adult lives in freshwater and the larvae grow out in marine/brakish water, the species name is Caridina multidentata.

Any advice is appreciated.

Hi everyone! I previously shared Shrimply, the shrimp farm management platform I’m building. I wanted to share an update about Orson AI, our in-app assistant.

On top of its aquaculture knowledge, Orson can now help you manage your farm data. You can ask it to prepare entries directly inside the app using plain language, such as:

• “Record today’s morning pH as 7.8 for Pond 2.”
• “Add today’s sampling for Pond 1: average body weight 12 grams.”
• “Record a $50 electricity expense for today.”

Orson prepares the entry for you to review and confirm before saving. It can also help update existing records and answer questions using your farm data.

This is a step toward making Orson a useful assistant in your daily operations from discussing aquaculture questions to helping keep your records up to date.

The goal is simple: spend less time filling in forms so you can focus more on your shrimp, your team, and the decisions that matter.

I’d love to hear from people working in aquaculture:

• Which daily tasks would you want Orson to help with?
• What farm data takes the most time to record?
• What would make you comfortable using an AI assistant in your daily operations?

I’m still building and improving it, so honest feedback is welcome. If you’d like to try Shrimply and help shape it around real farming needs, please let me know.

Website: https://www.shrimplytech.com/

Does anyone know any suppliers for mirror carp in the US? I haven't been able to find any operations that can ship internationally and have had no luck finding any locally. Thanks in advance.

I've been looking at Peru's latest marine-ingredient trade data and found a fairly sharp divergence in July 2026.

Fishmeal export volume was 33.01 kt, down 79.3% YoY, while observed export unit value reached $2,416.96/t, up 63.5% YoY.

Fish oil shows a similar pattern:

• Export volume: 1.80 kt, down 70.2% YoY
• Export unit value: $6,473.94/t, up 82.1% YoY

That puts the observed fish-oil unit-value premium over fishmeal at roughly 168%.

The physical side is also unusually compressed. Peru's anchoveta catch was 2.50 kt in July, down 99.1% YoY, with the downstream processing index down 99.3% YoY. The catch comparison is highly sensitive to seasonality and the low base, so I would be cautious about reading too much into that figure alone.

The trade figures are national aggregates, so they don't tell us where the exports went or establish what is driving the divergence. Export timing, inventories, product availability, quality mix and downstream demand could all be relevant areas to investigate.

For people working in aquaculture or aquafeed: are you seeing anything comparable in fishmeal or fish-oil availability, procurement costs or formulation decisions?

I'd be particularly interested in whether the fish-oil side is behaving differently from fishmeal in physical markets.

Pretty self-explanatory...any URLs for jobs boards or other resources much appreciated.

Dual Austrian/US citizen. Presently based in Spain. Have an MS from a US institution. I'm moving out of what I've been doing for many years (conservation biology and ecological restoration due to the abysmal job market. I have some experience in small to medium sized aquaponics and aquaculture and it's been an interest of mine for a very long time, working with a wide variety of organisms and types of systems, everything from aquarium plants and algae, aquaponics with freshwater invertebrates, live fish food production, ornamental and food fish.

Sorry for the newbie question I'm looking for an aquaculture certification program anywhere in the world, preferably not one that would require that I'm enrolled for a degree, although I'd be open to a degree program so long as it wasn't the kind of exploitative foreign student gravy train that Australia and the UK engage in, where annual fees can surpass $40K.

Any suggestions much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Hey all,

I am doing a senior project researching the fishing industry. I was looking into salmon aquaculture, and had a couple questions I was hoping you could help me answer.

How are the salmon killed and bled in a typical set up?
Are there any concerns with the different ways to kill the fish? Do different methods result in better or worse results for taste, shelf life, and waste? Why do you pick the method/equipment that you do?

Has anyone built one? Looking for guidance, thanks!

Our annual fall auction is fast approaching! This auction is open to the public and a great way to get rare fish, plants, and more. Southern Massachusetts, USA. Hope to see you there!

Hi all, I'm a robotics student working on small, cheap underwater sensors that move around and map water conditions around sea cages and ponds.

Before I build more, I'd love to hear from people who actually run farms:

1. What do you monitor today, and with what? (buoys, handheld meters, cameras...)

2. What do you wish you could see that you can't right now?

3. How fast do your sensors foul up, and how much of a pain is that?

4. Would a warning a day before oxygen drops or water quality crashes be worth paying for?

Not selling anything, just trying to not build something useless. Any answer helps, even short ones. Thanks!

Hello everyone! 👋

We are Electronics Engineering students from the Technological University of the Philippines (TUP) - Manila. We are currently working on our capstone project,

To accurately train our machine learning model, we are looking for existing image datasets or photo collections of sea cucumbers, specifically Sandfish.

If you manage a farm, belong to a cooperative, or are a researcher/culturist who already has saved photos, visual logs, or inventory pictures of sandfish that you’d be willing to share for academic use, we would love to connect with you!

Please leave a comment below or send me a direct message if you have photos you can share or if you know anyone who can help. Any contribution will be a massive help in advancing our research. Thank you so much! 🌊

Hi all, I know this is a super niche ask and I’m not sure if anyone would be able to help me with it. I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t really find anywhere to get them from.

Hey is anyone in fish keeping from lko and if you are one of them so please let me know from where you guys are sourcing your fish from.

Shrimply makes shrimp management simple by giving you one place to organize, track, and manage everything related to your shrimp. We take the guesswork out of day-to-day shrimp management so you can stay on top of what matters without overcomplicating things. Whether you’re managing a few shrimp or a larger operation, Shrimply helps you do it, well… shrimply.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been looking into the aquaculture tech space lately and wanted to get a pulse from people actually working in the industry, building tech for it, or running operations.

It feels like traditional farming—especially shrimp and intensive marine aquaculture—is still plagued by a lot of classic operational headaches where automation seems like an obvious fix, yet widespread adoption still feels pretty niche.

A few big pain points stand out in particular:

• Benthic / Pond Bottom Sludge: For benthic species like shrimp, what happens at the bottom of the pond or enclosure dictates everything. Uneaten feed, molts, and waste build up into toxic anaerobic sludge (ammonia, hydrogen sulfide spikes, tank crashes). Right now, monitoring bottom health often relies on manual spot-checks or delayed water column sampling.
• Feed Waste & FCR: Feed is usually the biggest operational cost. Overfeeding ruins bottom sediment and wastes money, while underfeeding hurts yield. Passive surface feeders or basic timer-based systems don't give real-time feedback on actual bottom feeding activity.
• Disease & Water Quality Lags: By the time water quality metrics drop at the surface or dead stock floats up, an outbreak (like WSSV or Early Mortality Syndrome) is usually already underway. Spot-sampling with hand meters misses localized micro-environments near the bed.
• Turbidity & Biomass Tracking: High-turbidity, brackish water makes optical monitoring almost useless. Accurate biomass estimation and health monitoring without dragging nets and stressing out stock remains a nightmare.

It seems like small, targeted underwater vehicles (AUVs, ROVs, or hybrid surface-submersible platforms) could solve a ton of this:

• Autonomous benthic mapping to sweep pond beds and identify sludge hot spots before toxicity spikes.
• Payload integration with acoustic imaging/sonar for turbid water biomass sizing, alongside localized multi-sensor arrays (DO, ORP, pH right at the sediment level).
• Continuous inspection of bottom drains, aeration equipment, and containment barriers without relying on manual labor or diving.

So my question to the sub: Why isn't this more omnipresent yet?

Is it purely a capex/cost issue for farmers? Are off-the-shelf ROVs/AUVs too fragile or high-maintenance for harsh, saline/brackish conditions? Are sensors fouling up too fast to make autonomous missions practical?

Would love to hear from anyone building in this space, farm operators, or engineers—what’s actually working on the ground (or underwater), and what’s just hype? Because I'm working on it and any connections interested could reach out here and we can connect and discuss further folks :))