Fish farm Apollo Aquarium yesterday opened a $1 million plant to rear groupers at its land-based Lim Chu Kang farm.
The 12-tank experimental system, which will rear 300kg to 400kg of fish in each tank, is a method to farm fish on land using high-tech water treatment.
Apollo Aquarium is possibly the second farm to rear fish this way. The first, a 1,400 sq m farm in Pasir Ris, rears more than a million sea-bass fingerlings each year for sale to other farms.
Farms such as these are helping to boost the productivity of Singapore’s food-fish farms.
The Republic currently produces 7 per cent of the food fish that it consumes, but aims to increase that to 15 per cent.
Another experimental farm in Choa Chu Kang rears freshwater fish, such as tilapia and marbled gobies, but it uses water-cycling technology in high-rise, stackable cages.
In all of these, water is treated and recirculated in self-contained systems which clean it more efficiently. That protects the fish from disease, lowers death rates and allows more fish to be reared in a single tank.
This is not Apollo Aquarium’s first foray into such technology.
In 2009, with help from a Spring Singapore technology improvement grant, it built a $600,000 system for its ornamental fish that reduced water usage dramatically and fewer fish died.
Previously, it had lost $70,000 to $100,000 worth of fish a year.
After installing the new system, its losses were slashed to $15,000 last year.
Now, its marine food-fish venture will focus on mouse groupers, a plump spotted fish worth $160 a kilogram live, tiger groupers and hybrid groupers.
The aquarium said it will conduct tests to find the type of feed and conditions that best suit these hard-to-rear, delicate fish, which are native to tropical coral reefs and now heavily overfished.
At conventional farms, the survival rate of mouse groupers is 1 to 10 per cent.
Mr Eric Ng, Apollo Aquarium’s chief operating officer, said a high-fat diet for the fish was a no-go. ‘After they eat, they sink all the way to the bottom and don’t swim, and can develop a fatty liver,’ he said.
In a year, Apollo aims to expand to two 200-tank farms, and to rear lobsters and crabs.
It recently signed a $2 million deal with a Vietnamese firm to develop a water-treatment system for shrimp farming.
