Recirculating aquaculture system (RAS), as a modern highly intensive aquaculture mode, demonstrates the advantages of environmental friendliness, high efficiency and sustainable development, and has been widely used worldwide; they are also expected to be more widely applied in industrial aquaculture in the future as our natural resources are decreasing. However, RAS imposes very high requirements on operating conditions, including temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, stocking density, light, feed composition, feeding amount, feeding frequency, and disinfection methods. Each factor is critical to the stable operation of the system. Therefore, to ensure the efficient and stable operation of RAS, its influencing factors must be controlled to within appropriate ranges. Herein, the factors affecting the operation of RAS are reviewed, and the mechanisms of their influence on the reared organisms are revealed, and suggestions on the control of these factors in aquaculture are proposed. This review can provide a theoretical basis for the further development of RAS.

Marine plankton are faced with novel challenges associated with environmental changes such as ocean acidification, warming, and eutrophication. However, data on the effects of simultaneous environmental changes on complex natural communities in coastal ecosystems are relatively limited. Here we made a systematic analysis of biological and environmental parameters in the Bohai Sea over the past three years to suggest that plankton communities responded differently to current changing coastal environments, with the increase of phytoplankton and the decrease of zooplankton. These different changes of phyto- and zooplankton potentially resulted from the fact that both the effect of acidification as a result of pH decline and the effect of warming as a consequence of increasing temperature favored phytoplankton over zooplankton at present. Furthermore, water eutrophication and salinity as well as heavy metals Hg, Zn, and As had more or less diverse consequences for the dynamics of phytoplankton and zooplankton. Differently, with ongoing climate change, we also revealed that both phytoplankton and zooplankton would decrease in the future under the influence of interactions between acidification and warming.

Extensive multi-species harmful algal blooms (HABs) were triggered by Super Typhoon Lekima in Laizhou Bay (Bohai Sea) in August 2019. After conducting two field cruises before and after the typhoon passage, we employed both high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-pigment and microscopic methods to study the changes in the phytoplankton community and biomass. Following the passage of Lekima, the average surface salinity decreased, while dissolved inorganic nitrogen and dissolved silicate concentrations increased in the study area. The phytoplankton abundance and Chl a significantly increased after the typhoon event. Post-typhoon, the highest abundance values of Pseudo-nitzschia spp., Noctiluca scintillans, and Coscinodiscus spp. reached 10⁶ cells/L and those of Bacillaria paxillifera, Ceratium spp., and Gymnodinium catenatum were in the order of 10⁵ cells/L. HPLC-pigment CHEMTAX analysis showed that the biomass (Chl a) of dinoflagellates, diatoms, cryptophytes, chlorophytes, and haptophytes increased significantly after the typhoon. The increase in Chl a concentration was mainly attributable to large-sized phytoplankton, which are mostly diatoms and dinoflagellates. This study highlights that typhoons may cause HABs by introducing large amounts of freshwater and nutrients and change the phytoplankton community in a temperate and inner bay.

Laizhou Bay is plagued by many environmental problems (e.g., acidification and eutrophication) that are likely to increase in the coming decades along with social and demographic trends. We thus conducted 12 cruises from July 2019 to December 2021 in the Laizhou Bay to evaluate the potential influences of human activities on its eutrophication status. The results showed that the parameters of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) and oxygen (DO) exceeded the water quality standard in some cases during the past 3 years, suggesting DIN and DO were the crucial factors controlling water quality in the bay. Meanwhile, DIN was identified as a major pollutant in the region, and played an important role in driving the phytoplankton dynamics. Furthermore, with the increases in human-related nutrient inputs (especially DIN), the bay environment reached the mild eutrophication level and was probably at risk from excessive nutrient loads at present, further evidencing the ecosystem degradation.