How to manage seasonal fluctuations in aqua farming
23 June 2025
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3 minutes
Aquaculture farmers around the world face seasonal challenges that directly affect fish health, growth, and farm productivity. Understanding and managing these changes is essential for successful operations. Three important seasonal challenges include:
1) Fluctuations in temperature:
- Cold seasons: can slow down fish metabolism, reduce feed intake and growth. In extreme cases, ice covers can limit gas exchange which may lead to a depletion of dissolved oxygen in the water.
- Hot seasons / Heat stress: can increase fish metabolism and oxygen consumption, this can lead to a dangerous mismatch (as the water contains less oxygen due to higher temperatures) leading to hypoxia.
2) Fluctuations in rainfall
- Wet seasons: rainfall and runoff can introduce sediments, pollutants, or pathogens into the culture systems of fish. Thereby it can decrease water quality, and cause various other issues such as increased turbidity, turbulence, and the risk of water inversions.
- Dry seasons: drought can reduce the total culture volume, leading to (potentially too) high stocking densities. It also concentrates potentially toxic metabolites and nutrients which can cause algal blooms.
3) Fluctuations in: Cloud covers, winds, hurricanes
Most seasonal changes cause stress to the fish. When fish are stressed, the likelihood of disease outbreaks increases (thus requiring close monitoring during these periods). It is important to minimize additional stressors to the fish as much as possible. A few examples to do this is to:
- Reducing the feed supply; When fish are stressed, their feed intake decreases. It is therefore important to adjust the feeding regime to avoid feed waste (which, in combination with warm temperatures, can cause algal blooms) and to minimize metabolic stress on the animals.
- Limiting handling of the fish
- Reduce stocking density
- Closely monitor water quality
