An Analysis System for Operations and Environmental Impact of Offshore Tuna Farms

Commercial culture of fish in ocean cages has grown rapidly in the past several years, but the U.S. remains a minor producer despite the fact that it imports over $10 billion of seafood annually. Concerns about environmental impact and the associated difficulty of obtaining licenses have proven a major obstacle. Our software program, AquaModel, provides quantitative estimates of the dispersion and ecological fate of fish farm wastes that addresses these constraints. During Phase II, we will complete development of Aquamodel by adding improved mapping of coastal flow, an interface to automatically link and display output from circulation models running on large computers, and computer code to accelerate computations. We will also add a bio-chemical subroutine describing the response of the benthic community to organic loading, and expand our database on the growth and metabolism of newly cultured species. We conclude our work by developing a mariculture information system for the south coast of Oahu, Hawaii. This information system, which will be delivered to the Hawaii Department of Agriculture, will expedite mariculture planning and permitting in a state where open ocean farming is growing rapidly. It will also serve notice that we are ready to open shop for mariculture consultation throughout the U.S. and overseas.