Premiere aquaculture show COVERS THE FIELD
BY PHILIP JAMES A
quaNor is a forum for participants in the aquaculture industry from Norway and around the world
to meet, exchange ideas and see the newest novelties, products,
current research and development projects of relevance to the industry. The meeting is held biannually and
this year attracted 17,500 visitors from 61 nations to the Norwegian city of Trondheim. Some 460 exhibitors vied for the visitors' attention and for this reason AquaNor is recognised as being one of the largest and best- known aquaculture trade shows in the world. The array of technology and
information on show at AquaNor 2011 was sometimes breathtaking, with my favorite being the automated vaccination machine capable of vaccinating 20,000 fi sh per hour, or fi ve per second! On show were all the current developments in the fi elds of aquaculture technology, fi sh feed (surprisingly, the large feed companies did not actually have stands at the show but had numerous delegates present), fi sh health, quality assurance, training, funding, fi sh farmer networks, grading, equipment, storage, processing, packaging, environmental protection and distribution. Given that Norway now produces more than one million tonnes of salmon per annum (by comparison, New Zealand produces 7500 tonnes of salmon per annum, less than one percent of Norwegian production) much of the technology and information on show at AquaNor was directed toward salmon farming. This suited the two Kiwis I bumped into just fi ne, as
one was from New Zealand's largest salmon production company and the other represented AQUI-S, a New Zealand-made marine anaesthetic used in fi sh farming. Despite the focus on salmon production there were a huge variety of products on show, ranging from the quirky "happy fi sh" stand, which sold relatively simple but apparently effective wrasse condominiums (they apparently make wrasse "happy") to large-scale industrial products. These included polar circle salmon cages which were 200m in circumference and constructed from 500mm diameter fl oating pipes, 2.7m wide net cleaners capable of vacuuming 1400sq m of net surface per hour, and sewing machines capable of producing dosing nets with a surface area of up to 5000sq m. There were many biological-related exhibits, including the use of farmed cleaner wrasse to control sea lice populations in Norwegian salmon farms. This has proven so effective that farming Ballen wrasse has now become an industry in itself in Norway and a number of other European countries. Not everything on show was huge. For example, the smallest
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011 ■ services,
PET electronic tags now available are a mere 8.4mm long and can be inserted directly into a fi sh or encased in a streamer tag for instant identifi cation of a fi sh (or a range of other marine species) in a crowded cage. This makes scientifi c research on large groups of fi sh in sea cages signifi cantly easier and more meaningful. There was something for everybody at AquaNor, and even the opening by King Harald V of Norway was a crowd-pleaser!
The only disappointment was the
price of a beer in Trondheim of around NZ$17 for a 300ml glass. If you can handle that, next year (the alternate year to AquaNor) is the 2012 Nor-Fishing show, the world's leading fi sheries exhibition, with all the latest and greatest gadgets and toys for large and
small-scale fi shing. See you there and BYO beer!
VIP.AC31
NZ AQUACULTURE ■
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