The Professorship of Aquaculture and Sea-Ranching at the University of Rostock is well connected in the national and international aquaculture research landscape. With its current research topics, the Professorship Aquaculture and Sea-Ranching is well integrated into the current research community, such as aquaponics, resource utilization and efficiency of aquaculture feeds, reproduction and rearing of fish larval stages, but also parasites and diseases or environmental impacts of aquaculture. In addition, with the existing infrastructure, the professorship has modern production and research capacities, which are used for stand-alone projects, but also for national and international cooperative projects.
The existing infrastructure includes the so-called FishGlasHouse, a state-of-the-art research infrastructure with 3 recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) for commercial fish production and a total of 6 glasshouse chambers, which can be used for various research questions.
The Professorship Aquaculture and Sea-Ranching exclusively uses 2 chambers for experimental recirculating aquaculture systems, which offer the option for exclusive experiments with animal aquaculture candidates as well as the option for coupled aquaponics experiments as well as 2 further chambers for plant experiments under aquaponics conditions.
In addition, there are further laboratories with differently dimensioned labscale scale recirculating aquaculture systems for larvae and juvenile fish experiments as well as section and teaching rooms. The equipment is rounded off by a food-safe slaughter room and a pellet press for the production of (sinking) aquaculture feed. Various laboratories are available for analysis, which are equipped with photometers, an autoclave and various microscopes, among other things.
• Growth experiments with fish/shrimp and plants
• Potential aquaculture organisms, e.g. African catfish (Clarias gariepinus), Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), Pikeperch (Sander lucioperca), Whiteleg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei)
• Potential plant species, e.g. Basil (Ocimum basilicum), Mint (Mentha spicata), Wheatgrass (Triticum aestivum)
• Research parameters, e.g. growth (weight gain, SGR - Specific Growth Rate), FCR - feed conversion rate, protein conversion rate and protein efficiency rate, various body indices (e.g. hepato-somatic index, viscero-somatic index, gonado-somatic index)
• Feed production, in which the recipe and ingredients can be selected individually
• Water analysis
• Dissolved nutrients, e.g. nitrogen and phosphorus compounds, iron, selenium
• Particulate nutrients, e.g. organic content, physical calorific value
• DNA analysis
• Molecular species identification, e.g. for the identification of parasites in aquaculture species
• Microbiome analyses
• Identification of the bacterial composition in aquaculture process water or in the digestive tract of culture organisms
• Photo documentation and analysis of cultured organisms using modern binoculars and microscopes techniques, including CLSM = confocal laser scanning microscope