Saving Seafood

How AI is changing commercial fishing and aquaculture

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As one of humanity’s oldest professions, fishing is sometimes unfairly maligned as being old-fashioned or relying on outdated technology.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.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

AI transforms scallop stock assessments for greater accuracy

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.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Mysterious Pacific Ocean sounds identified as a type of whale—a new AI app helps track them

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 ‘ 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.

Read the full article at Phys.org

Albertsons cuts seafood waste with Afresh’s AI technology

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.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Artificial intelligence joins the crew

June 16, 2023 — Researchers around the world are using AI and machine learning to identify and avoid bycatch. 

Call it inevitable. If doctors are using artificial intelligence (AI) to read X-rays and MRIs, how long could it be before fishermen could use AI to identify bycatch?

While AI assisted bycatch control systems are not yet fully operational and on the market, they are close, and a number of U.S. and European players are collaborating on development.

“We’ve got a network of people all working on this,” says Noelle Yochum, a former NOAA bycatch reduction expert, now working for Trident. “We’re sharing information in the hopes of getting at least one over the finish line.”

While Yochum’s primary concern has long been halibut and salmon bycatch in the Alaska pollock fishery, the problem is worldwide. The current estimate of global discards in commercial fisheries is 27.0 million metric tons, with a range of from 17.9 to 39.5 million mt.

“I read that the value of that was somewhere around $84 billion US dollars,” says Hege Hammersland, Business Development Manager for Scantrol Deep Vision, a Norwegian company using AI to help reduce bycatch.

“Scantrol Deep Vision started about 10 years ago,” says Hammersland. “We developed a big box camera system that we commercialized for research in 2017.” According to Hammersland the company collected millions of images from the research model and used those to teach the unit’s computer how to identify size and species. “We’re working with a Spanish company, Gerona Vision Research, that specializes in machine learning.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Artificial intelligence to help New England fishermen be more eco-friendly

August 3, 2021 — New England Marine Monitoring is working on making things easier for fishermen here in Maine and across the region. To do that, the nonprofit is implementing new technology like better video review platforms, better cameras on boats, and increased artificial intelligence, which CEO Mark Hager said is the most exciting.

New England Marine Monitoring, in partnership with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and Vesper, is developing artificial intelligence for fishermen.

Shamit Grover, a partner at Vesper, said while Vesper is not a fishing company, it can still help collect data that will help the fishing industry.

“We think we can create solutions that will be really helpful to fishermen,” he said.

The goal is to make commercial fishing both economically and ecologically better. Hager added that artificial intelligence will be able to get through much of the “white noise” on a vessel as it’s moving around looking for fish, and the video will create a colorful box around the fish.

Read the full story at News Center Maine

Small-scale fishermen turn to apps and AI to tackle climate change

March 2, 2021 — From weather predicting apps to using artificial intelligence to monitor the fish they catch, small-scale fishermen and coastal communities are increasingly turning to digital tools to help them be more sustainable and tackle climate change.

Overfishing and illegal fishing by commercial vessels inflict significant damage on fisheries and the environment, and take food and jobs from millions of people in coastal communities who rely on fishing, environmental groups say.

In addition, climate change affects on small-scale fishermen – who account for about 90% of the world’s capture fishermen and fish workers – include fish moving to new areas in search of cooler waters or if their habitat is destroyed, rising sea levels, and an increase in the number of storms.

Launched in January by nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Small-Scale Fisheries Resource and Collaboration Hub (SSF Hub) is a multilingual website that aims to bring together fishermen, their communities and advocacy groups to connect, share ideas and find solutions to the problems they face.

Read the full story at Reuters

EDF’s SmartPass program aims to bring artificial intelligence to US fisheries management

February 18, 2021 — Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is launching a new program with the aim of improving data collection and fisheries management.

The program, SmartPass, integrates shore-based cameras with artificial intelligence to get a more accurate assessment of the number of vessels fishing in a particular region, according to EDF Global Fisheries Initiatives Senior Manager Sepp Haukebo.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

This New App Uses AI To Grade Tuna Freshness

July 10, 2020 — Sushi is only as good as the fish wrapped inside its barrel of rice and seaweed. If the tuna, yellowtail, or salmon isn’t fresh, it not only looks gross, but renders the whole roll underwhelming in flavor and texture.

To keep things from getting fishy, a Japanese company has developed a new mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to grade the freshness of cuts of tuna on sight. Aptly named Tuna Scope, the system uses thousands of cross-sectional images of tuna tails as training data to learn what good quality tuna looks like.

According to the Tuna Scope website, trained fishmongers use the tuna tail as a “road map” detailing the fish’s flavor, texture, freshness, and overall excellence. Traditionally, master tuna merchants look at things like color and sheen, firmness, and the layering of fat to set fish prices. The silkier the meat looks, the better it probably tastes.

“The goal behind the development of this system was to pass down skills in the field of tuna evaluation, an area with a serious shortage of successors,” Dentsu, the Tokyo-based digital marketing company that led development of the app, said in a press release.

Read the full story at Popular Mechanics

Precision fisheries of the future will rely on data and AI to improve profits

January 21, 2020 — The fishing industry is catching up to the data-driven digital revolution already remaking land-based agriculture and other industries.

And the fishing industry doesn’t need to wait for the future to arrive: the technology and advanced analytics that could improve environmental sustainability and increase profitability are available today, a recent report from global consulting and management firm McKinsey & Company concludes.

Read the full story at Seafood Source