Elsevier

Aquaculture

Volume 231, Issues 1–4, 5 March 2004, Pages 361-391
Aquaculture

Integrated aquaculture: rationale, evolution and state of the art emphasizing seaweed biofiltration in modern mariculture

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aquaculture.2003.11.015Get rights and content

Abstract

Rising global demand for seafood and declining catches have resulted in the volume of mariculture doubling each decade, a growth expected by the FAO to persist in the decades to come. This growth should use technologies with economical and environmental sustainability. Feed accounts for about half the cost in current high-volume fed mono-species aquaculture, mainly fish net pens or shrimp/fish ponds, yet most of this feed becomes waste. The resulting environmental impact and rising feed costs therefore hamper further growth of such farms. As in certain traditional polyculture schemes, plants can drastically reduce feed use and environmental impact of industrialized mariculture and at the same time add to its income. These nutrient-assimilating photoautotrophic plants use solar energy to turn nutrient-rich effluents into profitable resources. Plants counteract the environmental effects of the heterotrophic fed fish and shrimp and restore water quality. Today's integrated intensive aquaculture approaches, developed from traditional extensive polyculture, integrate the culture of fish or shrimp with vegetables, microalgae, shellfish and/or seaweeds. Integrated mariculture can take place in coastal waters or in ponds and can be highly intensified. Today's technologies are well studied and documented. They are generic, modular and adaptable for several culture combinations of fish, shrimp, shellfish, abalone, sea urchin and several species of commercially important seaweeds and vegetables. A 1-ha land-based integrated seabream–shellfish–seaweed farm can produce 25 tons of fish, 50 tons of bivalves and 30 tons fresh weight of seaweeds annually. Another farm model can produce in 1 ha 55 tons of seabream or 92 tons of salmon, with 385 or 500 fresh weight of seaweed, respectively, without pollution. Preliminary calculations show a potential for high profitability with large integrated farms. Several freshwater integrated fish–vegetable farms and a couple of modern fish–algae–shellfish/abalone integrated mariculture farms exist today, and several additional farms are planned. Three major international R&D projects promise to soon expand the horizons of the technology further. Therefore, modern integrated systems in general, and seaweed-based systems in particular, are bound to play a major role in the sustainable expansion of world aquaculture.

Section snippets

Introduction and rationale

While capture fisheries fall short of world demand, annual consumption of seafood has been rising, doubling in three decades (FAO, 2000). Obviously, just as we no longer depend on hunting, we can no longer depend solely on fishing. Even today, aquaculture provides over a quarter of the world's seafood supply, a figure the FAO expects will approach 50% by the year 2030 (Tidwell and Allen, 2001). With the diminishing availability of freshwater, most of this growth will take place in seawater.

Seaweed as a monoculture

The culture of organisms that are low in the food chain and that extract their nourishment from the sea involves relatively low input. It is therefore no surprise that the two predominant cultures in world mariculture are extractive-seaweed and filter-feeding shellfish FAO, 2000, Muller-Feuga, 2000, Troell et al., 2003. One seaweed, Laminaria japonica, cultured on long-line ropes in the coastal waters of China, constitutes over half of the world's aquatic plant production Chiang, 1984, Fei et

The evolution from polyculture, through fish–phytoplankton–bivalve to modern seaweed-based integrated intensive mariculture

Thanks to their manageability, land-based aquaculture systems offer much promise for sustainability in tropical, subtropical and temperate mariculture. Issues such as solid waste management, nutrient recycling and feed conversion enhancement are more easily and profitably addressed on an industrial scale on land than in open-water fish farms. Pond mariculture also allows the farmer to confront and mitigate the difficult issues of ecosystem degradation, mangrove degradation, exotic species

Seaweed-based integrated mariculture

A primary role of biofiltration in finfish/shrimp aquaculture is the treatment by uptake and conversion of toxic metabolites and pollutants. Bacterial biofilters oxidize ammonia to the much less toxic but equally polluting nitrate (e.g., Touchette and Burkholder, 2000), while microalgae photosynthetically convert the dissolved inorganic nutrients into particulate “nutrient packs” Kaiser et al., 1998, Troell and Norberg, 1998 that are still suspended in the water. Macroalgae (seaweed), in

Principles of seaweed biofilter design and operation

Ammonia is toxic to most commercial fish at concentrations above 100 μM (1.5 mg NH3–N l−1) Wajsbrot et al., 1991, Hagopian and Riley, 1998. To avoid toxicity, the capacity of any useful fishpond biofilter to remove TAN (total ammonia N, NH3+NH4) should therefore match the rate of TAN production. In seaweed-based integrated mariculture systems, TAN and the other excess nutrients from the fed finfish/shrimp culture are taken up by seaweed. Most systems studied used Ulva spp. and Gracilaria spp.,

SeaOr Marine Enterprises—a modern seaweed-based integrated farm

SeaOr Marine Enterprises, on the Israeli Mediterranean coast, 35 km north of Tel Aviv, is a modern intensive integrated mariculture farm. It is the culmination of much of the knowledge reviewed in the present article. The farm cultures marine fish (gilthead seabream), seaweed (Ulva and Gracilaria) and Japanese abalone (Fig. 1). This farm best utilizes the local advantages in climate and recycles the fish-excreted nutrients into seaweed biomass, which is fed on site to the abalone. The process

Economics

In the cost sheet of a modern intensive fish culture farm, the cost of fish feed proteins constitutes the largest item. However, three quarters of the proteins fed to the fish are excreted and eventually end up as dissolved ammonia. Algae recapture from the water and recycle ammonia, carbon dioxide, orthophosphate and micronutrients back into useful, protein-rich (>35% of dw) biomass Neori et al., 1991, Neori et al., 1996. As predicted by Ryther et al. in the 1970s (Huguenin, 1976), seaweed

Conclusions

A large body of good-quality research has been made worldwide, on different integrated aquaculture systems that use plants to take up waste nutrient and at the same time add to the income of the farms. Today's integrated sustainable mariculture technologies have developed from the traditional “all in one pond” polyculture and allow much higher intensification. R&D over three decades has brought the integrated land-based technology to a commercial reality. Through plant biofilters, integrated

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Israeli Ministry for National Infrastructures, the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Commerce and several grants from the European Union (A.N. and M.S.), the Ministry of Science and Technology of Israel, Binational Israeli–American Fund for R&D in Aquaculture (BARD), and the Negev-Arava R&D Network (A.N.); the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, AquaNet Network of Centres of Excellence for Aquaculture (T.C.; this paper is contribution no.

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