August 29 2025 — An upcoming event at Palo Alto, California, U.S.A.-based Stanford University will challenge young engineers to use AI to optimize sustainable seafood catch for fishing companies without losing revenue.
AI Commerce Inc., an AI-enabled e-commerce company also based in Palo Alto, has announced that it is putting on the second annual Sushi Hackathon on 3 October at the Stanford Alumni Center.
August 20, 2025 — The deep sea, the planet’s most expansive and least understood ecosystem, remains largely unexplored. Yet while the deep sea may seem a dark and distant space, events underwater directly impact our lives, from essential services like climate regulation to fisheries and the marine food web. While scientific understanding of this realm is nascent, a new industry is rapidly emerging driven by the demand for rare metals essential for batteries, microchips and AI: deep-sea mining.
In the past three years, more than 38 nations have voiced support for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, a rapid pace by the standards of multilateral lawmaking, and the equivalent of one new country signing on per month. This progress marks a major shift from just a few years ago, when states were either supportive of mining, reluctant to take a position, or were simply uninformed.
The triggering of a treaty provision known as the “two-year rule” by the nation of Nauru in 2021, intended to accelerate deep-sea mining in areas beyond national jurisdiction, brought increased attention and scrutiny to the activity. Nevertheless, some private actors are pushing for the granting of applications for commercial deep-sea mining of minerals like copper, nickel and cobalt, despite significant concerns from global leaders, the scientific community and the public at large.
This divergence between scientific understanding and prevailing narratives came into sharp focus at the recent annual meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). There, nations gathered to discuss matters profoundly consequential for the future of the deep ocean. However, there also seemed to be a broad understanding that a strong regulatory framework based on science, equity and precaution must be in place before an informed decision can be taken, and that no mining activities should commence in the meantime.
Moving forward, it’s imperative that we actively counter misinformation, significantly invest in scientific research, and, in the interim, take concrete measures to ensure that deep-sea mining activities do not commence in the absence of clear science, robust regulations, sufficient safeguards, and equity.
August 18, 2025 — New technology is coming to Alaskan fisheries thanks to a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
The grant was to the Alaska’s Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA) and the $485,000 will be used to develop technology to incorporate artificial intelligence into the existing electronic monitoring (EM) program.
ALFA is partnering with the Canadian company Archipelago Marine Research to enhance its FishVue AI tool, training it for Alaskan sablefish and halibut fixed gear fisheries. This move is expected to help increase efficiency and lower costs for the fishermen.
“If you participate in federal fisheries, your vessel is over 40 feet, you’re required to have either an onboard observer or an electronic monitoring, an EM camera system, on your vessel for a percentage of your trips that get monitored and that’s federal regulation,” ALFA policy coordinator Lauren Howard explained.
August 4, 2025 — Longline fishermen in Southeast Alaska are embarking on a new program to advance use of artificial intelligence technology in their fishery monitoring program, thanks to a $485,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
The plan announced by the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA) in Sitka on July 28 calls for partnering with the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSMFC) and Canada’s Archipelago Marine Research Ltd. to enhance Archipelago’s FishVue AI tool and train it for the Alaska sablefish and halibut fixed gear fisheries.
The project will focus on increasing efficiency and lowering the fleet’s overall observer cost. “Many small boat fishermen prefer EM systems over human observers, so increasing the usefulness and effectiveness of EM should have direct benefits to our members and Alaska’s fixed gear fleet in general,” said Lauren Howard, policy coordinator for ALFA.
Archipelago, based in Victoria, British Columbia, is an industry leader in fisheries electronic monitoring. The firm works with the fishing industry, non-government organizations (NGOs) and regulators to implement sustainable practices through at-sea and dockside observer programs, electronic monitoring technology, and marine environmental services.
ALFA, Archipelago and PSMFC also have EM expertise in the Gulf of Alaska where the project will be based.
June 12, 2025 — At this week’s U.N. Oceans Conference in the south of France, delegates need only glance outside the conference hall at the glittering Mediterranean for a stark reminder of the problem they are trying to solve. Scientists estimate there are now about 400 ocean “dead zones” in the world, where no sea life can survive—more than double the number 20 years ago. The oceans, which cover 70% of Earth and are crucial to mitigating global warming, will likely contain more tonnage of plastic junk than fish by 2050. And by 2100, about 90% of marine species could be extinct.
But for all the grim talk among government officials, scientists, and investors, there is also much discussion about something that might help: Artificial intelligence.
AI has been used by oceanographers for many years, most commonly to gather data from robots sitting deep underwater. But scientists and environmentalists say breakthroughs just in the past few years—first, with generative AI, and since this year with vastly more sophisticated agentic AI—open possibilities for which they have long been waiting.
“What is very new today is what we call the ‘what if’ scenarios,” says Alain Arnaud, head of the Digital Ocean department for Mercator, a European Union intergovernmental institution of ocean scientists who have created a “digital twin of the ocean”—a forensic baseline examination of the global seas.
Depicted on a giant live-tracking monitor mounted in the conference’s public exhibition space, the “digital twin” shows dots of 9 billion or so data points beamed up to satellites from underwater cameras. While that type of data is not necessarily new, innovation in AI finally allows Mercator to game out dizzyingly complex scenarios in split-second timing. “Is my tuna here? If I fish in this area, at this period, what’s the impact on the population? Is it better in that area?” Arnaud says, standing in front of the live tracker, as he described just one situation.
Until now, turning vast quantities of data into policy and actions has been dauntingly expensive and lengthy for most governments, not to mention the nonprofit environmental organizations and startups that have poured into Nice this week.
But now, some say the focus on oceans could open a whole new tech front, as countries and companies try to figure out how to reduce their environmental impact and as AI applications proliferate.
May 15, 2025 — Microsoft Corp. has awarded NOAA Fisheries researchers two years of advanced computing power and technical expertise to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) model aimed at improving salmon habitat management in the Columbia River Basin.
The collaboration is part of Microsoft’s “AI for Good” initiative, a program supporting projects that promote sustainability, public health, and human rights in Washington state. The partnership, which coincides with the tech giant’s 50th anniversary, will see NOAA Fisheries tap into $5 million worth of Azure cloud computing credits, helping researchers more accurately and efficiently forecast how changing river flows impact salmon habitats.
“The model trained on high-resolution satellite images should more quickly and easily show salmon and water managers how changes in flows can expand or reduce available salmon habitat along rivers and streams,” said Morgan Bond, a research scientist who leads the project at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center. “This approach should speed that up significantly.”
Until now, gaining such insights required labor-intensive fieldwork and detailed analysis to evaluate even limited areas. With AI processing satellite images across vast regions, scientists expect to cut both time and cost dramatically — while gaining a broader, more detailed view of the watershed.
Read the full article at the National Fisherman
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.
October 3, 2024 — Artificial Intelligence and machine learning help researchers take a giant step toward more accurate stock assessments.
Since the early 2000s, New England and Mid-Atlantic scallop fisheries have been managed sustainably through temporary area closures and periodic harvests by vessels limited to seven-person crews. This sound management depends on accurate numbers, and the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) relies on data drawn from different sources for its Atlantic sea scallop stock assessments. “We get data from Coonamessett Farm Foundation (CFF), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation, and others says Teri Frady, communications chief at NOAA Fisheries. But Frady is particularly interested in new AI-augmented data coming from the work of Dvora Hart at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center—NEFSC—in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “I’m always interested in what Dvora is doing,” says Frady.
September 23, 2024 — A team of oceanographers and marine biologists from the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center and Oregon State University has identified a mysterious noise heard in the Pacific Ocean for two decades as the sounds of Bryde’s whales.
In their study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, the group identified the sound and worked with a team at Google to develop an AI application that could be used to track the whales‘ movements.
The mysterious sound was first recorded in 2014, when its metallic ping was designated a “biotwang.” Since then, the sound has been recorded multiple times in multiple locations. In 2016, a team at Oregon State University found evidence that it was most likely some type of baleen whale.
November 27, 2023 — Albertsons is rolling out an artificial intelligence platform chain-wide to reduce seafood shrink.
After a successful pilot project earlier this year, the Boise, Idaho, U.S.A.-based grocer is implementing AI technology from San Francisco, California, U.S.A.-based Afresh Technologies through the 2,200 grocery stores it operates under the Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, Vons, and ACME banners.