Researchers from UC Santa Cruz’s ecological aquaculture lab won a three-year, $1 million grant from the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative at the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Researchers from UC Santa Cruz’s ecological aquaculture lab won a three-year, $1 million grant from the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative at the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. This funding will support collaborative research to develop, test, and evaluate new low-polluting fish feed formulas for farm-raised rainbow trout.
Associate Research Professor of Environmental Studies Pallab Sarker will lead this work alongside Environmental Studies Professor Anne Kapuscinski and Luke Gardner, a California Sea Grant extension specialist affiliated with UC San Diego. The team will use a marine microalga as an ingredient in their fish feed, and the resulting experimental formulas will be field-tested at working trout farms in California.
The goal is to create an environmentally sustainable and economically viable new feed option that maximizes fish growth while limiting the potential for water pollution during the fish-farming process.
Water pollution is a sustainability challenge for the aquaculture industry because fish waste contains nitrogen and phosphorus. These are nutrients that have the potential to fuel algal blooms in nearby waterways, if wastewater from large-scale fish production is not handled properly. But low-polluting fish feeds are specially formulated to help address this challenge.
Read more at University of California - Santa Cruz
Image: At UC Santa Cruz’s ecological aquaculture lab, researchers are working with rainbow trout to test new sustainable fish feed formulas developed using alternative ingredients. (Photo Credit: Carolyn Lagattuta)
