The expansion of aquaculture necessitates innovative disease detection methods to ensure sustainable production. Fish diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites result in significant economic losses and threaten food security. Traditional detection methods are labor-intensive and time-consuming, emphasizing the need for automated approaches. This study investigates the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for classifying freshwater fish diseases. Such CNNs offer an efficient and automated solution for fish disease detection, reducing the burden on aquatic health experts and enabling timely interventions to mitigate economic losses. A dataset of 2444 images was used across seven classes—bacterial red disease, bacterial Aeromoniasis disease, bacterial gill disease, fungal disease, parasitic diseases, white tail disease, and healthy fish. The CNNs model incorporates convolutional layers for feature extraction, max-pooling for down-sampling, dense layers for classification, and dropout for regularization. Categorical cross-entropy loss and the Adam optimizer were used over 50 epochs, with continuous training and validation performance monitoring. The results indicated that the model achieved an accuracy of 99.71% and a test loss of 0.0119. This study highlights the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in aquaculture for enhancing food security.

The aquaculture and fisheries sectors are critical sources of nutrition and employment generation in many developed and developing countries. Hence, any disruptions to these sectors due to the COVID-19 pandemic have a far-reaching impact, leading to a cascading chain of disorder affecting people’s food security and livelihoods. Relating to these fish sectors, we reviewed COVID-19’s implications for the food security of these vulnerable countries. The current study indicated that COVID-19 and its related preventive measures have severely disrupted the fish demand and supply chain by creating considerable fish price volatility. As a result, the vulnerable aquatic communities have adopted several short-term coping strategies, including fish overwintering, delayed fish stocking time, and feeding the overcrowded fish with low-priced food. Since the long-term coping strategies are still unclear, we recommended certain longstanding methods that are likely to safeguard food security and livelihoods if adopted.

Transcription activator-like effector nuclease (TALEN) plasmids targeting the channel catfish gonadotropin-releasing hormone (cfGnRH) gene were delivered into fertilized eggs with double electroporation to sterilize channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus). Targeted cfGnRH fish were sequenced and base deletion, substitution, and insertion were detected. The gene mutagenesis was achieved in 52.9% of P₁ fish. P₁ mutants (individuals with human-induced sequence changes at the cfGnRH locus) had lower spawning rates (20.0–50.0%) when there was no hormone therapy compared to the control pairs (66.7%) as well as having lower average egg hatch rates (2.0% versus 32.3–74.3%) except for one cfGnRH mutated female that had a 66.0% hatch rate. After low fertility was observed in 2016, application of luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone analog (LHRHa) hormone therapy resulted in good spawning and hatch rates for mutants in 2017, which were not significantly different from the controls (p > 0.05). No exogenous DNA fragments were detected in the genome of mutant P₁ fish, indicating no integration of the plasmids. No obvious effects on other economically important traits were observed after the knockout of the reproductive gene in the P₁ fish. Growth rates, survival, and appearance between mutant and control individuals were not different. While complete knock-out of reproductive output was not achieved, as these were mosaic P₁ brood stock, gene editing of channel catfish for the reproductive confinement of gene-engineered, domestic, and invasive fish to prevent gene flow into the natural environment appears promising.

Accurately measuring willingness-to-pay (WTP) for newly developed food products is critical for academicians and marketing managers. This study measures consumers’ preference and WTP for five newly developed convenient (ready-to-cook) catfish products by surveying 128 participants from Arkansas and Florida. An ordered probit model was applied to survey data to investigate factors influencing consumers’ WTP. Results indicated that the surveyed participants preferred all the inspected products as their WTP was ranged between average and high. The significant variables affecting the participants’ WTP include product appearance, eagerness to buy, preference ranking, preferred form, and consumption pattern. The consumer’s WTP was significantly correlated with the participant’s gender, age, race, and for some groups, income.

The southwest coastal belt of Bangladesh is characterized by a fresh and saline water interaction which gives rise to a discrete inter-saline freshwater convergence zone (ICZ). Hydrology and farming along this transition zone is influenced by upstream and downstream abiotic factors including salinity intrusion and water flow. To better understand the changing geography of the transitional ICZ line and the relative influence of these hydrological events on farming therein, the recent study compared relative changes from 2010 to 2014 based on qualitative and quantitative survey work with 80 households of 4 villages (Shobna, Faltita, Badukhali and Rudaghora) from Khulna and Bagerhat district. Contrary to the conventional hotcake climate change induced salinity intrusion the study found a significant decrease in saltwater influx and increased freshwater volume in the ICZ villages, reflecting a seaward movement trend. Farmer perception shifted to low saline and freshwater in many areas where it was high saline and medium saline in 2010. The factual and perceived salinity were varied from 1 ± 0.44 to 2 ± 0.77 ppt in the studied villages. To confront the condition farmer diversified their farming pattern from single crop like either only shrimp or prawn culture to concurrent culture of shrimp-prawn, shrimp, prawn and rice with an increased production of (68-204 kg/ha), finfish (217-553 kg/ha) and dyke crop (92-800 kg/ha). Thus, affecting the socioeconomic condition of the farmer with an increase in average monthly income, reported for the better-off classes in 2014, ranged from 14,300 to 51,667 BDT and for the worse-off ranged from 5000 to 9900 BDT. In contrast, this average monthly income was 9500- 27,000 for better-off and 3875 - 8600 for worse-off classes, reported in 2010. Besides, farming areas (average 17% for better-off and -0.5% for worse-off) and land leasing (average increment rate per ha 50%) also increased among the surveyed farmers, reported in 2014 compared to 2010. In addition, several adaptation strategies like unrefined salt use, change of water use, diversification through prawn, finfish and dyke crops along with traditional shrimp and overall land use change have a positive impact on farmer's economic and nutritional security as well as farming intensity. The study showed a unique attributes of salinity extrusion in micro-level of ICZ line where farmers intensified farming system with indigenous knowledge to secured their livelihoods.