Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing primary food production areas globally and fish farming has now surpassed wild catch fisheries in terms of annual tonnage of product produced. As a Research Fellow in the SALTT lab, my research focuses on improving aquaculture production through rigorously testing of new and innovative production techniques that strive to make aquaculture more environmentally sustainable and improve the health and welfare of fish produced in commercial production facilities.
My main research areas focus on:
- Test trialling submerged sea cage salmon farming as an alternative farming method to enable salmon farms to move further offshore to areas of the ocean that have more stable and optimal environmental conditions.
- Researching the use of tag technology to enable the use of sentential fish as bio-indicators of fish health and welfare in commercial aquaculture.
- Investigating the potential use of sea urchin roe enhancement aquaculture to create a commercial driver to incentivise the removal of overabundant urchins from barrens in Port Phillip Bay as a method to drive cost neutral restoration of kelp forest reefs.