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Automated bioreactors for live feeds Robert Roulston and Jennifer Long, Industrial Plankton
Figure 1. PBR 1250L.
Reliably producing enough live feed is the bottleneck for many shellfish, shrimp and marine finfish hatcheries. The feed has to be of good quality with both high nutrition levels and low pathogen levels. Without enough feed, animals starve or are underfed. When operating a hatchery, operators have probably calculated the cost of this loss and weighed it against the live feed’s production cost. The true cost of poor-quality live feeds is often given less attention, since it’s usually impossible to calculate the impact on the entire value chain. Live feeds are
commonly contaminated with pathogens that increase the mortality of hatchery animals, or even kill the entire cohort. Animals that do survive by fighting off early infections often have less efficient feed conversion ratios and lower growth rates, often resulting in a lower yield in the grow-out phase. To help solve these problems with reliable production and feed quality, Industrial Plankton has developed live feed equipment for producing algae and zooplankton with a focus on maintaining a stable biosecure culture environment.
Hatchery Feed & Management Vol 8 Issue 1 2020
