Cermaq Canada rolls out analysis tools across all sites
California-based ocean analytics pioneer Scoot Science today said that salmon farmer Cermaq Canada has become the first company to unlock the full power of its new forecasting tools in its proprietary software-as-a-service platform SeaState.
Cermaq, owned by Japanese industrial giant Mitsubishi, is also the first to activate the Scoot Integrated Welfare Index (SIWI) and to engage Scoot in bespoke analysis projects that helped refine the company’s standard operating procedures.
SeaState, an ocean intelligence platform for aquaculture, is now running across all 26 Cermaq sites in Canada. Real-time temperature, salinity, and oxygen levels are integrated with publicly available data to produce forecasts with regional and site-specific ocean conditions.
Fish welfare
The multi-day forecasts of ocean conditions are updated four times per day to give farmers information to help them to improve fish welfare, increase survivability, and operate more sustainably and profitably.
Cermaq, which produced around 16,500 gutted weight tonnes of Atlantic salmon on British Columbia in 2020, is also utilising SIWI, an index that quantifies the cumulative impact of both human and environmental induced stressors on the welfare of the fish. This added layer of insight helps farmers to take action and plan mitigation for both real-time and forecasted threats.
“SeaState has the power to change the way ocean-based salmon farming operates. Our tools increase survivability, profitability, and sustainability of salmon farms anywhere in the world. We’re collaborating with Cermaq to expand our ocean intelligence toolset to their specific needs,” said Scoot co-founder and chief executive Dr Jonathan LaRiviere. “This is the approach we take with all of our clients.”
New understanding
Dr Kathleen Frisch, senior veterinarian at Cermaq Canada, said: “We’ve needed an innovative system that not only connects our variety of data streams, but also makes our data useful. Scoot Science’s work is giving us a new level of understanding of how the ocean conditions affect our salmon and our operations in context of the local environment and our interactions with it.
“Now our team can easily anticipate and act quickly if a threat is approaching, integrate new innovative hardware solutions with our existing infrastructure, mitigate impacts and maximise the full value of our ocean monitoring efforts.”
Unified platform
SeaState can be used with different brands of hardware and information systems, integrating disparate data sources into a unified platform. The platform’s flexible framework enables farms to adopt emerging sensor technologies and integrate those new solutions with systems that have been on site for years.
Scoot Science now has customers in Canada and Norway including Grieg Seafood BC, Cermaq Canada, and others.
The company has also recently joined the Scotland-based Sustainable Aquaculture Innovation Centre’s consortium of aquaculture-related businesses.
