Team:NCKU Tainan/HP/Silver

Human Practice



The Philosophy of Our Project

According to FAO’s "The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2016" report, world aquaculture production had reached 45% to total production of aquatic animals that would one day exceed capture fisheries. However, when aquaculture becomes more and more important, great amount of water to sustain fish survival is needed. In order to get large quantity of water, the most common way in Taiwan is to use groundwater. As time went by, growing need of water caused "groundwater overdraft" then has become the most notorious problem in Taiwan—— and also leads to the irreversible disaster "land subsidence", especially in central and southern Taiwan, where aquaculture is most popular and exactly the place our school locates. Furthermore, untreated wastewater would pour into the river, causing "eutrophication" that greatly breaks the balance of nature.

"No Problem" project’s philosophy is to reduce water usage while not disturbing the increasing aquaculture production. "Not to disturb the industry, but to solve the problem within micro-organism." We want to strike a balance between water usage and production, by the means of sensing the nitrate concentration in the water, and creating an intermediate regulating system to reduce exceed nitrate. In this way, we keep water in good quality and the meanwhile reduce the use of water to prohibit land subsidence from worsening.

Dialogue


Content

Our project is closely related to the local environment. To succeed in this project, we must step out of laboratory and meet experts from all over the country. Both academic institution and local industry are included in our visiting program. Academic institution includes "Center of Shrimp Disease Control and Genetic Improvement", which aim at developing a sustainable shrimp farming industry in Taiwan. And local industry includes a Prawn fishing owner.



Experts

Academic Center of Shrimp Disease Control and Genetic Improvement / professor Lo, Chu-Fang

On July 20, 2017, we went to An-Nan Campus of National Cheng-Kung University, having a visit with professor Lo, Chu-Fang,who is the owner of "Center of Shrimp Disease Control and Genetic Improvement." The center has been OIE Reference Laboratory for White Spot Disease. Professor Lo’s team have cultivated a black tiger shrimp that is resistant to the white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) in a collaborative study with OSO Organic Shrimp Farm. Furthermore, Lo's team cooperates with Delta Electronics. In this way, they want to increase the shrimp farmers’ revenue, and drive a renewed and sustainable shrimp farming industry in Taiwan.

Get Inspired

After the talking with professor, we got some useful advices

  • To manipulate water quality, water temperature and salinity should be taken into consideration.
  • Different species of aquatic need different condition to grow. Therefore, we should visualize which species we target in our design.

Detecting NO3⁻

  • In academic institution, they test every pool three times per day. They use auto-detecting device, which cause 7-10 thousand USD. They pump water into the central processing device to detect the water quality. The device can process 8 parameter each time.
  • We target on "concentration of nitrate." The experts said that if we want to detect more than ten pools, all the samples should be measured within one hour, according to their experience.

With these advices, we've gotten a clear sight into our project. To find out the species, we have searched for different aquatic growing condition. After we finished the efficiency test of our product, we could find out the best working environment and modified our design.

Local industry

Prawn fishing owner

Prawn fishing is a popular place for Taiwanese entertainment, which symbolizes the long-lasting tradition of Taiwan. We visited Mr. Jiang, the owner of one Prawn fishing in Keelung (a city of Northern Taiwan) on August 29.

Mr. Jiang has owned the Prawn fishing for 20 years. He introduced Giant river shrimps, one of the most popular shrimps for fishing in Taiwan, into his 100t pool. Because Giant river shrimps live in freshwater, Mr. Jiang use running water as water source. Shrimps for fishing are fed in the big pool in the center of Prawn fishing and prepared shrimps are stored in a pool in a little room behind it. In the little room, there is a pump automatically circulating water. Water is pumped to a black box which contains a layer of sponge, corallite, and nitrifying bacteria to create "treated water."

Get Inspired

After we introduced our project to Mr.Jiang, we got some useful advices

  • Think of the total project's value, what is the unique part of our project and how to wave it into the promotion of our product?
  • The ways of aquaculture are different from person to person. Even using the same system, they would have different results. So if we want to introduce our project to the market, we have to try this system in different pools and get ideal results, which would be convincing to our target consumers.

These advices are useful in the future promotion of "NO problem" system. We realized that in local industry there were not a standard formula to tell them how to "successfully culture fish." It depended on their experience to figure out a sound way, and it would be a secret of them. After talking to Mr.Jiang, we grabbed the thought of local industry and we believed that it would be useful in our future promotion.