Monitoring and control of marine pool ecosystem: a step toward organic farming. Part I and II

Cod mariculture is a new and fast growing aquaculture activity in Norway. For a sustainable development of any aquaculture of fish, it is extremely important to have a mass rearing juvenile of high quality. Established in 1987 in Lofoten Island, Lofilab AS aims to develop a cost-effective and integrated production of cod juvenile by using a natural pool system in the production of algae and zooplankton as first feed. Lofilab AS runs also its own production of rotifers in land-based production facilities to buffer natural changes affecting the zooplankton production in the pool. Lofilab AS reaches now a level of production where it becomes necessary to develop new tools to be able to increase the production in a sustainable way. Therefore Lofilab AS wishes to collaborate closely with Bioforsk to build up knowledge towards the development of organic or more environmentally friendly fish farming. The partners of this project are already closely related though the EU founded NorthCod project. In a previous project called “Monitoring and control of marine pool ecosystem: a step toward organic cod farming” financed through the Mabit program, Lofilab AS and Bioforsk have demonstrated that they were all eager to answer the challenge of developing environmental friendly industry, healthy and sustainable products. This initiall the project was designed for a 2 years period, but this time in 2007, the Mabit program could only provided financial support until the end of 2008. Therefore, the initial application has been modified to fit a 1 year period project. In this new application, Lofilab AS and Bioforsk wish to pursue their collaboration and continue their work started in the first collaborative project. As Norwegian regulation existing about organic fish production has been identified during the first project, Lofilab AS and Bioforsk wish now to initiate collaboration with some of the Norwegian actors for organic production in order be able to generate some advice to help the cod farmers in developing their activity. The knowledge that has been built up during the first project about the understanding the species interactions in the pool, shall be comforted by complementary observations. A better understanding of the pool ecosystem shall provide indication of the manners to employ to decrease the natural predation pressure on the zooplankton biomass and increase the quantities harvested for feeding the cod juvenile. The tools to control natural pool ecosystem in ecologically sustainable manners will be explore in more accurate ways.