A Review on Mariculture Effluent: Characterization and Management Tools

Abstract

While marine aquaculture, or mariculture, has been growing rapidly and globally in recent decades, many environmental concerns remain to be fully addressed to achieve its long-term goal of sustainable development. This paper aims to provide a synthesized perspective on these issues by reviewing and discussing the characterization, transport, and current modelling and management tools associated with effluents released from mariculture sites. Specifically, we examined the effluent characteristics and behavior from source-to-sink, including the composition and load of effluent discharge, its transport and transformation processes in the water column and at the seabed, and its impacts on the pelagic and benthic environments. We then focused on management-related issues, including the setting of the regulatory mixing zone, the establishment of environmental standards, monitoring measures, and modelling techniques to depict the current state-of-the-art modes in a global context. Our study shows that while substantial progress has been made in understanding the nature of the mariculture effluent, as well as in monitoring and modelling its transport and fate, the regulatory framework still lags behind in many countries where the mariculture industry is relevant. This is particularly evident in the lack of consistent criteria for the definition of regulatory mixing zones and the associated environmental standards for water quality and benthic impacts. Besides, as new predictive models are emerging quickly, their proper evaluation and validation are imperative in view of their increasing application in regulatory practices. This review is intended to provide references for advancing regulatory management of mariculture effluents, as well as for promoting sustainable mariculture development.

Inputs of Total and Labile Dissolved Metals from Six Facilities Continuously Discharging Treated Wastewaters to the Marine Environment of Gran Canaria Island (Canary Islands, Spain)

“…This seems to be especially relevant in the case of the marine fish farm facility (TP- 6), where differences in the temporal distribution of the farming processes (feeding, use of chemicals, water recirculation, waste load, etc.) may affect the temporal content and speciation of metals significantly [ 40 ]. Differences in the physicochemical characteristics of the analyzed effluents.…”

Condition Index, Meat Yield and Biochemical Composition of Mediterranean Mussel (Mytilus Galloprovincialis Lamarck, 1819) from Canakkale Strait, Turkey

“…Some authors indicated that metabolic waste, feces and some uneaten feed pellets which included high amount of nitrogen in put made by the fish farm might reason the raised phytoplankton biomass (i.e. concentration of chlorophyll-a) and particulate organic matter in the sea water (Kaspar et al, 1988;Wang, et al, 2020). Cheshuk et al (2003) observed that there was no difference in the growth and condition index of bivalves at a distance of 70, 100, 500, 1200m from the fish cage.…”

The Influence of Different Operation Conditions on the Treatment of Mariculture Wastewater by the Combined System of Anoxic Filter and Membrane Bioreactor

“…Driven by the world population growth demand, mariculture industry had developed rapidly [1,2]. A large amount of wastewater produced by the marine aquaculture industry, characterized by high salinity and a large amount of suspended solids, nitrogenous compounds, and organic matter, is directly discharged into the environment, which would cause great harm to the environment [3]. Marine aquaculture wastewater could be treated by physical chemical or biological methods, among which biological methods have the unique advantage of reducing costs [4][5][6].…”