Biofouling Community Development on Commercial Cage Nets Submerged in a Cage Aquaculture Facility in the Red Sea
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Biofouling Community Development on Commercial Cage Nets Submerged in a Cage Aquaculture Facility in the Red Sea Mohammad Abdulaziz Ba-Akdah 1 & Sathianeson Satheesh 1
&
Mohsen M. O. El-Sherbiny 1
Received: 10 February 2020 / Revised: 24 June 2020 / Accepted: 26 June 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The colonization of biofouling organisms is a significant problem for the aquaculture installations which affect the economy of the fish farms and wellbeing of the cultured fish. In this study, the colonization of biofouling organisms on cage aquaculture nets submerged near to the existing floating cages was analysed for a period of one year from June 2017 to May 2018. Cage net panels were fitted onto an iron frame and submerged at 1 m depth near to existing aquaculture cages. The biofouling organisms found on the panels mainly consisted of macroalgae, bivalves, bryozoans, hydrozoans and ascidians. Some other epifauna like brittle stars, polychaetes, amphipods, crabs, gastropods were also occurred more occasionally on the nets. Recruitment of green algae and brown algae were observed from the first month of net panel exposure. Bivalves and ascidians were developed from the second month. Hydrozoans and bryozoans appeared on the nets after 7 months of panel deployment. Results also revealed that ascidians and bivalves were the dominant fouling organisms in most of the sampling months during this study period. Keywords Biofouling . Aquaculture . Cage farming . Ascidians . Antifouling . Red Sea
Introduction The colonization of marine organisms ranging from microorganisms to macroorganisms on newly submerged substrates in the marine environment is commonly referred to as biofouling (WHOI 1952; Wahl 1989). Biofouling development normally starts immediately after the submersion of the hard substrates in the marine waters and consists of at least four distinct events such as initial conditioning film formation, bacterial adhesion, attachment of phytoplankton, larval forms and algal spores (Wahl 1989; Abarzua and Jakubowski 1995; Taylor et al. 1997; Kerr et al. 1998; Corner et al. 2007; Satheesh and Wesley 2010). The factors that affects the development of biofouling on marine structures include substrate type, orientation, depth, seasonality and hydrodynamic conditions (Rodríguez et al. 1993; James and Underwood 1994; Glasby and Connell 2001; Satheesh and Wesley 2008; Dürr and Watson 2010; Chen et al. 2018).
* Sathianeson Satheesh [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Department of Marine Biology, Faculty of Marine Sciences, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Biofouling development on hard substrates is a common nuisance for maritime, aquaculture and other marine technology sectors warranting costly fouling management measures (Wahl 1989; Hodson et al. 1997; Camps et al. 2011; Satheesh et al. 2016). Aquaculture infrastructure can comprise ropes, nets, cages, and many other structures that provide suitable habitat for the settlement of fouling organisms (Powers et al. 2007;
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