biomass estimation of bluefin tuna in sea cages by the ... - Iccat

mientras que el sistema de vídeo estereoscópico proporciona información óptica y permiteestimar la talla y peso de los ejemplares. Los resultados preliminares indican que este usocombinado de técnicas proporciona información precisa para determinar la TS como unafunción de la orientación de los peces y para realizar un seguimiento adecuado de los atunes enlas jaulas flotantes.KEYWORDSBiomass, biometrics, aquaculture, bluefin tuna, acoustics,underwater, optical, target strength1. IntroductionIn order to alleviate the pressure on the wild fishery of the bluefin tuna and to aid in its preservation, thedomestication of this fish and the development of a sustainable aquaculture industry are necessary. TheSELFDOTT project (From capture based to self-sustained aquaculture and domestication of bluefin tuna(Thunnus thynnus) is implementing the knowledge on the reproduction of bluefin tuna in captivity. It aims toestablish the knowledge-based required for controlled development of eggs, larvae and suitable andenvironmentally performing feeds. It was launched in January 2008 and is funded under the 7th FP CooperationWork Programme: Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnology. While the life cycle is being close (De laGandara, 2009), efforts should be addressed to design growth control mechanisms that make the process efficientand therefore ecologically and economical sustainable for breeders. Moreover to assure the sustainability ofcaptured based aquaculture it is mandatory the development of reliable purse seiners caches estimationtechniques. Only the exact knowledge of these data will allow effective control of the stock of bluefin tuna. Todo this is necessary to characterize this species properly from the acoustic point of view, because hydroacoustictechniques have proven to be efficient tools for stock control in fisheries.With this aim, this work proposes an experimental setup that combines acoustic measurements (dorsal andventral) with optical techniques, to obtain biometric information on a non-intrusive concept, allowing monitoringof weight gain of specimens and optimizing of resources management. This experiment was conceived as a firstapproach to the problem and raises the expectations open so far in (De la Gandara, 2008) to obtain parametersshowing the biometric behavior and state of the specimens in the aquaculture cages.2. Material and methodsThe measurements were conducted in cages installed in the Mediterranean Spanish coast in El Gorguel(Cartagena). As stated above we disposed both an acoustical and an optical system. The optical system (is astereoscopic recording system) provides visual information of the specimens during measurement (behavior andorientation) as well as the length of the animals. The acoustic system consists of two split-beam transducersworking at 200 kHz, and a multiplexer, to operate them simultaneously with a scientific echosounder, governedby the same field computer than the optical system, therefore providing the necessary synchronization throughthe internal computer clock.The experimental scheme is shown in Figure 1. One of the transducers is placed 20 m from the surface (at thebottom of the cage) oriented upwards (to take ventral recordings) and the other aligned with the first, is placedon the surface oriented to the bottom, therefore providing dorsal information from specimens crossing the beam.Finally the VICASS systems placed 13 m from the surface, and aligned with the acoustical beams, with theobjectives of both cameras oriented toward the surface. The equipment is not placed in the center of the cage butslightly displaced to one side (7 meters from the perimeter of the cage) so that the probability that a fish passesthrough the beam is larger because the specimens in captivity swim describing circles in the cage.All the equipment is operated from a boat moored near the cage. The ping repetition rate is set to 200milliseconds, what implies with a multiplexed signal, that a ping is sent by the same transducer every 400milliseconds, being the output power 90 W. The optical system took a picture every 2 seconds. We took a totalof 1200 images.Acoustic and optical data are analyzed separately at first and then jointly. The processing of acoustic data isperformed using software Sonar5_Pro (Balk 2008) (developed by Balk and Lindeman at the University of Oslo).285