Photo: Stian Rognlid, CEO
AI sorting moves into daily operations
An athlete’s VO₂ max test. An eye exam. A vet checking a dog’s gait.
All are examples of phenotyping – the measurement of observable traits in living organisms.
In aquaculture, phenotyping means something more urgent: Analysing live fish.
For decades, salmon producers have relied on group-level tools like size grading. It works to a point. Homogeneous groups are easier to manage. But fish farming is a biological system, not an assembly line. On the surface, two salmon may look identical. Underneath, they can be very different.
That’s where phenotyping comes in. With imaging and AI, farms can now sort fish in real time — at the speed of vaccination lines, up to 10,000 per hour — by traits that matter most: gender, organ health, disease markers, and resilience.
For the first time, phenotyping can be industrialized. Scaled to tens of millions of fish per year, it turns invisible signals into actionable decisions, making individual insight a driver of system-wide resilience.
The implications are significant. Phenotyping doesn’t just reduce mortality risk. It creates stronger groups, shorter production cycles, and more predictable harvests. Each improvement compounds across the salmon life cycle, strengthening both animal welfare and the bottom line.
Mortality in the sea phase has stubbornly hovered around 16%. Cutting that figure significantly would transform both profitability and welfare. But doing so requires sharper tools — tools that look beneath the surface.
Aquaculture has already invested heavily in genetics, vaccines, and feed. The next frontier is smarter decision-making about the fish themselves, as individuals, not just as groups.
That is the mission we pursue at Aquaticode: Bringing phenotyping out of the lab and into daily production, turning AI-driven insight into practical, scalable tools for farmers.
If the industry is serious about changing the survival equation, it must stop equating “size” with “success.” By embracing phenotyping, producers can set the standard for the next decade of fish farming.
It’s time to measure what matters.
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Originally published in Aquabuzz.
