Water quality and health monitoring — HATCH global shrimp report

Water quality and Shrimp health monitoring

Biological processes in shrimp are directly dependent on their immediate physical and chemical environment. It is important to regularly monitor a series of parameters to ensure these are within their optimal range to promote efficient physiological processes such as respiration, metabolism and growth. This is especially important in ponds with higher densities as pond environmental conditions can change abruptly with external and internal influencing factors such as air and water temperature, rainfall and halted aeration during power outages. These changes can have serious consequences on the survival and growth of shrimp.

There are various ways farmers are monitoring the water conditions in the ponds from pure intuition based on experience to automated monitoring using wireless inline sensors. Colorimetric test kits and electronic probes are used to monitor physical and chemical parameters such as temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, alkalinity, total ammonium nitrate, nitrite, redox potential, magnesium and calcium. Water turbidity, microbial vibrio counts, zooplankton and phytoplankton populations are also monitored. Either farmers will measure their own parameters or farmers whom have contract agreements with feed and health product suppliers, receive a service from these companies once weekly to collect and analyze water samples from each of their ponds. Physical, chemical and biological results are received on the same day while microbial or vibrio analyses results are received the following day(s). Most farmer receives either a hard copy or a picture of the hardcopy on their smartphones.

Prior to shrimp post-larvae being delivered to the farms, many hatcheries, as a service, screen larvae for diseases. Thereafter farmers will either keep an eye on shrimp health, run their own diagnostic tests or use a third party institute to analyze shrimp and water samples for them during the production cycle.

Below is a country comparison on the use of varying water quality and health monitoring tools and methods.

data overview

Location	www.shrimpfarm.tech by HATCH	Indonesia	India	Ecuador	Thailand	Vietnam	China
Onsite water testing	Water Parameter Monitoring Irregularly or rountinely	Routinely	Irregularly	Irregularly	Routinely	Routinely	Routinely
	Water transparency testing Non or manual	Manual	None	None	Manual	Manual	None
	Refractometer Uncommon or common	Common	Uncommon	Common	Common	Common	Common
	Colorimetric tests Uncommon or common and manual kits or semi-automatic devices	Common, manual kits	Common, manual kits	Uncommon, manual kits	Common, manual kits	Common, manual kits	Uncommon, manual kits
	Electronic probes and model Uncommon or common, handheld or wireless	Common & handheld	Uncommon & handheld	Common & handheld	Common & handheld	Uncommon & handheld	Uncommon & handheld
	Microscopes Uncommon or common	Uncommon	Uncommon	Uncommon	Uncommon	Uncommon	Common
	Data measurement recording Non, uncommon or common	Common	Uncommon	Common	Common	Common	Common
	Final data capture method Handwritten, digitized on excel or automatic	Handwritten	Handwritten	Handwritten	Handwritten or digitalized on excel	Handwritten	Handwritten
Onsite shrimp health testing	Diagnostic Testing Pre stocking, regularly during the crop cycle or only after irregular shrimp behaviour is observed	Pre stocking and only after irregular shrimp behaviour is observed	Pre stocking and only after irregular shrimp behaviour is observed	Pre stocking and only after irregular shrimp behaviour is observed	Pre stocking and only after irregular shrimp behaviour is observed	Pre stocking and only after irregular shrimp behaviour is observed	Pre stocking and only after irregular shrimp behaviour is observed
	Diagnostic methods Visual observations, laboratory assays or mobile assay devices	Visual observations	Visual observations	Visual observations	Visual observations	Visual observations	Visual observations
Offsite water and shrimp health testing post stocking	Water Monitoring Service Non, Uncommon or common and frequency	Uncommon, once per cycle	Common, once weekly	TBD	Common	Uncommon	Uncommon, once per cycle
	Health monitoring service None, uncommon or common and frequency	Uncommon, 1 per cycle	Uncommon, on demand	TBD	TBD	TBD	TBD
	Service providers Government agency, supplier laboratories or third party private laboratory	Government Agency	Government agency & private laboratory	Supplier laboratories	Government agency, supplier laboratories	Private Laboratory	Private Laboratory
	Data format delivered to farmers Hard copy, digital image of hardcopy or raw data sent via text or email	TBD	Hard copy or digital image of hardcopy sent via text	TBD	TBD	Hard copy	TBD

Summary

All intensive farms keep an eye on water parameter conditions while extensive farms pay less frequent attention to this as they have little control or less risk.

Vigilant farmers in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam use the depth of water transparency to indicate turbidity, phytoplankton densities and potential biological oxygen demand (BOD).

Microscopes, usually used to monitor phytoplankton or shrimp health, are rare to find on non-corporate farms because farms either don’t have staff who has the capacity to use and maintain them or they because microscopes are too expensive to purchase or repair.

Most farmers do record their measurements, usually only on paper while historic records are only maintained for longer periods by either corporate farms or young farmers.

If farmers have their own laboratories, these farmers do their own tests onsite while all farmers in India use an established third party business service supplying external water testing once weekly.

Diagnostic tests are rarely done routinely throughout the crop cycle and are rather done for validation and diagnosis only after an irregular visual inspection is observed. Corporate farms with laboratory facilities will do the tests in-house while non-corporate farmers will send samples to the third party services provided by private laboratories at cost or free services provided by government agencies or their accredited feed or medical supplier companies. The diagnostic result report is either delivered back to the farmer per image sent via a mobile chat app or is collected by the farmer in person. Historical records are very rarely maintained.

Innovation opportunities

Farmers ideally are well informed about an accurate real-time status of their ponds before they make operational decisions. Since most farmers use manual colorimetric test kits to measure their parameters and lack the capacity to acquire fast enough results to make appropriate feeding and other decisions, farmers need new methods to support faster, accurate and more frequent data measurements along with information collection, storage and analysis.

Farmers neither have the capacity to keep digital records of their own and other monitoring results on existing platforms. To host historical data, analysis or predictive forecasting, we hope innovation will bridge this gap in automating the collection, storage and analysis of environmental and health data.

Although there are a few mobile applications and sensory tools with integrated water and health monitoring, those solutions seem to require further optimization of the user experience and integration into the user’s routines.

New diagnostic tools for health monitoring should be user-friendly, re-usable and ideally allow the simultaneous measurement and quantification of a range of different algae, pathogenic bacteria, and viruses.