October 25, 2024 — Commercial fishing isn’t always considered a high-tech industry.
As one of humanity’s oldest professions, fishing is sometimes unfairly maligned as being old-fashioned or relying on outdated technology. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Quietly, the commercial fishing and aquaculture sectors are incorporating advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to transform their understanding of the global seafood industry and the ways they operate within it. From automating aquaculture practices to tracking dark fishing vessels in the open ocean, AI is revolutionizing the way fishers, regulators, and producers are interacting with the world’s oceans.
The area in which AI technologies have seen the most widespread adoption is in aquaculture, where producers are using machine learning to monitor systems, sort animals and products, and automate feedings.
Drawing on CrunchBase data, ThisFish CEO and co-founder Eric Enno Tamm estimated that the seafood industry has invested more than $610 million on AI-related initiatives, with most of those investments coming from the world’s 10 largest aquaculture companies.
“These top 10 companies represent 86 percent of all the – at least publicly disclosed – investments in the industry, so it’s quite lopsided,” Tamm said at Seafood Expo Asia in Singapore last fall.
One example of how AI is being used in aquaculture comes from the U.K., where Mowi, the world’s largest salmon-farming company, has collaborated with Aberdeen University and the Scottish Association for Science (SAMS) on a trial using AI to detect sea lice in net-pen salmon farms. Currently, Mowi and other salmon farmers rely on lab-testing water samples under a microscope to detect sea lice, but the process can take several days to deliver results. In the trial, researchers have trained an AI with thousands of holographic images of sea lice so that it can automatically detect them in images taken by the camera.