Projects

The huge amount of man-made solid waste materials ending up in the oceans was identified as one of the pressing global challenges. We investigate the amount of microplastics in marine fish and if this is a threat for the animal.

Due to the strong economic growth, land in Vietnam is becoming a limiting resource. In a pilot project, aquaculture facilities are being roofed with photovoltaic elements to produce food and energy at the same time.

A major challenge in the sea food sector is to reliably discriminate between the several hundred commercially traded fish species. Fish species can be notoriously difficult to tell apart, in particular when we have to deal with processed fish such as canned fish, or fish fillets. DNA-based detection tests exhibit a so far underutilized potential to clarify both species identity and origin of questionable fish or fishery products. Such methodologies may help to reveal incorrectly declared fish goods and hinder blurring the traces of fish derived from illegal and unregulated fishing. While transparency and security for retailers and consumers is enhanced, this ultimately increases the level of sustainability in the exploitation of fisheries resources.

The Baltic Sea and its tributaries are an important distribution area of ​​the European eel. The Danish Belt-Sea with their three narrow straits Little Belt, Great Belt and Öresund provides a geographical bottleneck, which all Baltic Sea eels have to pass during their spawning migration into the western Atlantic. This geographic situation offers ideal conditions for studying the migration of silver eels from the Baltic Sea.

There are several reasons why aquaculture in Europe is only growing slowly. One reason is the low economic efficiency of several production system and an eco-intensification could improve it.

The BALANCE project combines a “mark-recapture” study approach and the use of acoustic telemetry in order to obtain a robust quantification of the silver eel escapement numbers in the River Ems. The results of this empirical estimation will be compared to the predictions of the German model-in-use to project silver eel escapement rates.

Together with Moroccan partners we investigate the pollution of fishes from Moroccan coastal waters.