Guelph – Ontario shrimp farmers could soon be going green – with algae. New research is using algae to naturally clean recirculating saltwater on shrimp farms. Still in the early development stages, the new, highly efficient process of removing nutrients and carbon dioxide from recirculating saltwater is being tested at the University of Guelph.
“It’s not a new idea,” admits Andreas Heyland, lead project researcher and integrative biology professor at the University of Guelph. “But we’ve been able to select highly efficient algae strains, which can be grown on the recirculating water.”
In-land shrimp farming has grown in Ontario in recent years with the demand for local shrimp in closer proximity to the marketplace. As a result, farmers are looking for new ways to manage nutrient build-up in the production system; conventional methods don’t produce much revenue and saltwater can’t be easily disposed in the environment. Continue reading