European Sea Bass Cultivation

Hi, my name is Tessa Goetjes with Connecticut Sea Grant and Yukon Extension. Today we're visiting Ideal Fish, Connecticut's largest finfish operator. At this facility hundreds of thousands of fish are grown every year and brought fresh to tables around the region. Let's dive in to learn how European sea bass are grown at this facility. Hello, I'm Eric Pettersen. I'm the founder and president of Ideal Fish. We are a recirculating aquaculture company located here in greater beautiful Waterbury, Connecticut right in the center of our state. We grow about 120 metric tons that's close to 250,000 pounds of a species called Bronzino or European sea bass. We grow it in a state-of-the-art recirculating aquaculture system that looks a lot like this. We grow the fish in tanks. The water is recirculated, it's cleaned, it's filtered, and then it is pumped back in crystal clear condition into the tanks where the fish grow. The fish are grown to about a pound and a quarter and after about 10 months we harvest them and they are supplied directly to our customers who are restaurants, grocery stores, and farmers markets. Hi, I'm Andy Russell, chief operating officer here at Ideal Fish. I'm standing in front of the water filtration system for the grow-out, basically the same as we have in quarantine just on a much bigger scale. Our drum filters take the solids out, our biofilter deals with the ammonia compounds, and then we remove the CO2, re-inject oxygen, and then disinfect the water. And this unit here is a foam fractionator where we take out the smallest of particles that the drum filters can't take out. Once the water is disinfected it then is returned back into the tanks about every 50 minutes. Bronzino is an ocean-going fish that is wild and also farm-raised in the Mediterranean. So here at Ideal Fish in order to grow Bronzino we need to put salt in the water to create a blended seawater that's appropriate for the way Bronzino regulate themselves. And we take Waterberry's finest tap water and we blend it with various sea salt compositions, some of which are made to resemble seawater in its entirety, and in some cases we will create our own blends that contain the macronutrients that Bronzino need in order to live comfortably in our system. And all of this happens in this part of the facility. The first step is to take one of these bags and drop it into our brine mixing station, which is over here. And in the brine mixing station we will create a solution that's about three times the strength of seawater, a highly concentrated brine that is then pumped into each of these six holding reservoirs, and they each contain about 9,000 gallons. So we have close to 50,000 gallons of fresh seawater makeup that's available to replace water in our system. So as you can see here, one of our techs is feeding the fingerlings. So we hand feed and machine feed, and so the hand feeding allows the technicians to see the performance of the fish, see how well they're eating, that they're satiated to maximize their growth. We don't want to feed them too much so that we're wasting feed, which is one of our most expensive raw materials, but we want to feed them enough feed so that we're maximizing the growth and minimizing the waste. So this is the final part of the journey that our fish travel through in our facility. After coming in as small fingerlings and being raised in the quarantine nursery systems, they grow to full size in our grow-out system, and we've explained how the water is processed and cleaned and returned to the fish to give them a comfortable life. And the final stage is the harvest, and this is a harvested bronzino. It's about 450 grams, which is a little bit over a pound. And this is the right size because at this size it can make a very nice filet, or it can be served as a whole fish without hanging over the plate. The fish are brought in from the grow-out facility after they are harvested into our processing area where they're cleaned, gutted, scaled, in some cases they're fileted, and they are prepared for packaging and shipment to our customers. We hope you enjoyed this segment on fish aquaculture. Tune in to our next video. Thanks!