SiPLABoratory

TUNAMOTION visit grant under AquaExcel3.0

AquaExcel 3.0 is an European project funded under the European Union Horizon 2020 Transnational Infrastructure Access (TNA) program. This project aims at enhancing aquaculture throughout Europe, by promoting experimental and scientific personnel exchange between institutions. TUNAMOTION aims at measuring acoustic particle motion of bluefin tuna in aquaculture tanks. The AQUAEXCEL 3.0 project is funded with a total of approximately 9.9 Meuro for 60 month. Starting date: November 2020. Partnership: INRAE (coordinator) + 21 EU institutions. People involved from SiPLAB: S.M. Jesus (visit grantee) [more...].

Aquaculture now provides over half of seafood for human consumption worldwide. The sector continues to grow annually to meet global demand and is the fastest growing animal production sector. However, within the EU, aquaculture production is still lagging, with a high dependency on imported fish remaining. Shifting consumer preferences, growing welfare concerns, new standards, and climate change are also affecting the industry. The sector’s sustainable growth can only be achieved through efficient and responsible production of high-value fish products. For the EU to maintain its global leadership in aquaculture research and sustainable development of the sector, better translation of research excellence into innovation and industrial growth is needed.

AQUAEXCEL3.0 aims to further boost the EU aquaculture sector by expanding the Transnational Access programme to support more external research teams collaborating with its high-quality facilities, providing free training courses on the latest topics and ensuring research is aligned with industry needs.

AQUAEXCEL3.0 builds on the previous AQUAEXCEL(FP7) and AQUAEXCEL2020 (H2020) projects and aims to develop new tools to keep pace with rapid scientific development and add value to existing tools and resources to benefit all users. It continues to have fish as its main target, but also includes shellfish and macroalgae research to push towards lower trophic level aquaculture.

TUNAMOTION objectives:
In collaboration with the research installation personnel and researchers, this project aims at developing, implementing and field testing the necessary methodologies to attain the following objectives:

• 1) to understand the correlation between behavior patterns and acoustic sound generation of bluefin tuna
• 2) to determine the acoustic particle motion and the sound pressure fields of a bluefin tuna shoal in a confined environment, and understand whether its behavior relies more on the information gathered through sound pressure or particle motion
• 3) to understand the impact of particle acceleration field generated by environmental noise