Google’s parent company Alphabet’s ‘X Development’, the company’s advanced research lab, has gone public with Tidal, a 3-year-old project described as having the potential to become a “substantial business”. As the owner of Google, YouTube and self-driving technology unit Waymo, also an X Development spin-off, Alphabet has plenty of experience when it comes to building and managing ‘substantial’ businesses. But the sector Tidal is targeted at making an impact in might come as a surprise – fish farming.
X Development, formerly known as Google X before it was taken out of Google and established as its own entity under the Alphabet umbrella, is best known for its work on self-driving cars, internet balloons, delivery drones, renewable energy-generating kites and secretive life sciences research. Over recent years the unit’s focus on solving environmental and sustainability problems has heightened. And Tidal is part of that direction.
Tidal’s core goal is to attempt to increase the amount of fish raised in fish farms that is consumed, with the idea that doing so will have the knock-on effect of reducing global consumption of wild fish and farmed meat.
Astro Teller, director of X Development, explains why Tidal’s goal to use advanced technology to improve and scale fish farming counts as an environmental sustainability project with:
“The oceans are falling apart thanks to us, thanks to humanity. So something has to change. No more [eating] fish isn’t really on the cards any time soon. What can we do to make it as good for the planet as possible?”
The conclusion has been that increasing the percentage of our protein derived from sustainably farmed fish will reduce the impact of the fishing industry on wild fish populations and ocean ecosystems. An additional gain would come from decreasing our intake of land-based proteins such as beef, which come with a deep carbon footprint.
The way that Tidal helps fish farming is through a system that is being designed to recognise, track and monitor every individual fish in farms that can hold from hundreds of thousands to even millions.
This is achieved by combining underwater cameras with AI able to track fish throughout their development, using their particular shapes and movements to identify individuals. Tide project lead Neil Davé explains:
“Some of these signals are happening in milliseconds.You’d be unable to see it with the human eye.”
The data, and insights the AI provides is designed to help fish farmers optimise aspects such as feeding, waste reduction and tracking fish health. That means the use of antibiotics in large scale fish farming, something that is a particular concern for environmentalists, can hopefully be significantly reduced.
“Really what we are hoping to do is provide these tools to farmers so that they can move their operations towards more sustainability,” continues Mr Davé. “There may be an opportunity there to relieve some pressure on wild fishing if we made aquaculture very compelling from an operational and environmental perspective.”
The greatest challenge for the Tide team has been developing a hardware system resilient enough to be reliable in a salt water, which kills electronics, high pressure underwater environment.
In future, the technology Tidal has developed for fish farms could also be used by scientists tracking endangered species that spend all or much of their time underwater, such as whales, otters and penguins. Alphabet believes that the commercial application in fish farming, the tech is already being trialled in Europe and Asia, will eventually provide a significant return on investment, which non-commercial scientific applications will then benefit from. Mr Teller comments:
“There are several trillion dollars a year at stake in the oceans and in humanity’s relationship with the oceans.”