The aquaculture team is gearing up for this semesters research and that means setting up a new study design. The 1,500 cobia that we have in the lab were randomly separated into 6 different tanks. The 3-phase plan took an entire day but all the fish were divided safe and soundly. We made a last minute change in our plans for the Island School research class and are now looking at how the cobia will perform on 3 different feeds.
The feeds will each have a different percentage of fish meal in them. This research will help in solving two issues. The first is that there is no aquafeed that is produced specifically for cobia and using wild caught fish to feed farmed raised fish is one of the biggest problems with the aquaculture industry. With this study we hope to be able to demonstrate that a low fish meal diet can be used to produce a marine finfish.