A revolutionary light and flow guided system is now ready to transform hatcheries and early life stages in aquaculture
The aquaculture sector still faces persistent bottlenecks, particularly during the earliest life stages of aquatic animals, when mortality rates remain high due to environmental stress, disease outbreaks and handling practices.
Across hatcheries worldwide, these fragile phases often determine the overall success of production cycles. Improving survival during hatching and early transfers could therefore represent one of the most important opportunities to increase efficiency, reduce costs and enhance animal welfare in aquaculture systems.
Recent technological developments are beginning to address these challenges through automation and intelligent monitoring. At the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), researchers have developed an innovative aquaculture platform designed to reduce stress during early life handling while improving productivity and operational efficiency.
Scalable aquaculture systems can improve survival, reduce labor, and enhance animal welfare
Automated light and flow guided systems drive productivity in cephalopod, shrimp and fish aquaculture.
To meet global food demands, aquaculture, the farming of aquatic creatures like fish or shrimp, is on the rise. Forming a multi billion dollar industry, an estimated 94.4 million tons of aquatic animals were produced by aquaculture in 2022 alone. However, productivity in the industry is still limited due to early life bottlenecks, with high mortality rates caused by disease outbreaks, environmental changes and stress.
Now, a team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST https://www.oist.jp/) has developed a scalable aquaculture platform designed to address these challenges. The system automates the sensitive phases of aquaculture, hatching and transfers, which can minimize pathogen exposure, animal stress and labor input.
Developing a scalable automated aquaculture system
The system was originally developed to support cephalopod research at OIST, where culturing squid and octopus is particularly challenging.
“Cephalopod hatchlings are extremely sensitive to direct manipulation,” says Dr. Zdenek Lajbner, who leads the project. “Guiding them using light and water flow allows us to improve survival while reducing stress and labor.”
The team, Zdenek Lajbner, Ryuta Nakajima, Mehmet Arif Zoral, Peter Babiak, John Parker, Mouez Lassoued and Jonathan Miller, designed a modular prototype, successfully testing this on multiple cephalopod species before recognizing the broader relevance of their system.
“Any aquatic species whose early life stages respond to light and flow, including fish and shrimp, can be maneuvered using the same principles,” notes Dr. Lajbner.
By using a light and flow approach, they could eliminate handling related stress by encouraging animals to move autonomously, improving welfare outcomes.
The team also integrated IoT enabled sensors to continuously monitor key environmental parameters including temperature, salinity and oxygen levels. These provide real time data and alerts to remote users. With automated, detailed, real time characterization of each transported individual, immediate automated decisions can be made based on the information obtained.
“Our modular design enables the systems to be integrated into existing facilities, used as standalone recirculating units, or configured as mobile systems,” adds Dr. Lajbner.
With integrated AI for automated counting, size based sorting, behavioral monitoring and health assessment, the platform could enable early stage evaluation of stock quality.
Standardizing early life handling and assessment could also help facilities shift from labor intensive and subjective manual observation toward fast, accurate, data driven decision making.
Enhancing welfare while improving productivity
Animal stress during hatching and transfer is an important contributor to mortality and long term aquaculture performance deficits. From an operational perspective, even modest improvements in early survival can have outsized economic effects and reduce wasted feed, labor hours and tank downtime.
“With global aquatic food consumption having increased by more than 480 percent since the 1960s, and growing pressure on wild stocks from climate change and overfishing, scalable automated aquaculture technologies are essential,” emphasizes Dr. Lajbner.
“We estimate that a 15 to 25 percent increase in early stage survival can significantly improve effective output at farm scale.”
The OIST team is now seeking industrial partners to validate the system in commercial hatcheries, expand species testing and scale the platform for large scale aquaculture operations.
Technical description of the innovation
Explanation provided by Dr. Zdenek Lajbner, lead developer of the new systems:
“The systems work using the natural phenomenon of phototaxis, in which animals are naturally drawn towards light sources. Many key species for aquaculture display phototaxis, including different fish, shrimp and cephalopods. By creating a light gradient between containers, and combining this with gentle water flow to support movement, we can transfer animals in an automated way. This reduces the amount of human labor involved, minimizing both pathogen exposure and stress for the animals, and thus improves animal welfare and survival.
In addition, by integrating a range of remote operated sensors and controls, we can monitor animals at an individual level and in real time, remotely. This is beneficial for stock counting and health checks amongst other core tasks for aquaculture operators.
Aquaculture operators can benefit also from the flexibility of the technology, which is designed to be modular and scale depending on the situation. Therefore, both small hatcheries and large farms should be able to adapt the technology to suit their set up requirements.
Overall, we hope the systems prove useful in automating some of the traditionally manual and time consuming tasks in aquaculture, and improving animal survival and productivity.”
A final thought
The Blue Life Hub team believes this innovation is particularly important because improving survival and welfare during the earliest life stages remains one of the most critical challenges in aquaculture. Technologies that can automate delicate hatchery operations while reducing stress, labor and mortality have the potential to significantly improve productivity, sustainability and the overall resilience of aquaculture systems. For this reason, the Blue Life Hub team is enthusiastic about this innovation.
A revolutionary light and flow guided system is now ready to transform hatcheries and early life stages in aquaculture
