Alphabet has presented a ‘moonshot’ that falls under its experimental division. With this project, cameras can track thousands of individual fish in fish farms. That should ultimately also have positive effects for the oceans and wild fish stocks.
Alphabet calls the Tidal project. It is part of X, the experimental division in which the company places projects to see if they can grow into independent companies. It is all about getting a better understanding of what goes on under water. Tidal focuses on a small part of this problem, namely investigating new resources to help fish farm owners with useful information and environmentally friendly methods to grow their business.
The company says it has surveyed fish farmers around the world for the past three years. It would appear that the farmers would like to contribute to, among other things, detecting diseases earlier and limiting the use of chemicals. Today, the health decisions of thousands of captive fish are still being made on the basis of inspecting some individual fish that are being removed from the water. According to Alphabet, this is time-consuming, unreliable and makes scaling up impossible.
Tidal is an underwater camera system with systems that can interpret the behavior of fish, which would not be visible to the human eye. According to Alphabet, the software used can track, observe and record their behavior at the same time. This concerns, for example, their eating behavior and environmental factors such as temperature and oxygen levels. According to the company, this gives farmers the opportunity to better chart the health of their fish and to make smarter decisions about managing the closed reservoirs for the fish.
Alphabet writes that fish have a relatively low carbon dioxide footprint compared to other sources of animal protein and that they are very important for feeding three billion people. According to Alphabet, this means that helping fish farm owners can ultimately be very important for humanity and the health of the oceans. The idea here is, among other things, that this project can somewhat relieve the pressure on the wild fish population in the oceans when keeping fish in confined spaces becomes very attractive from an economic and environmental point of view.
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