> Something that surprised us early on: only a tiny fraction of farmed fish species have been through genetic improvement programs. Chickens grow 4x faster than they did in 1950 because of decades of selective breeding.
I agree that there is an opportunity here for getting more calories per fish (and especially per input of feed, which is really what decades of chicken optimization are about). But the consequences of these changes for chicken welfare have been disastrous [0] and we're seeing a concerted effort to move to higher-welfare breeds (though still more efficient than ancestral breeds). Likewise, intensive salmon farming has led to widespread '“environmental dewilding,” or the process of modifying natural water bodies with artificial infrastructure — in this case, fish farm pens and cages — and polluting them' [1]. It sounds like there are lots of ways in which using more robots can make monitoring less-invasive, and therefore less stressful for fish. I certainly hope to see those attributes, rather than the potentially disastrous ones, emphasized as you move forward.
> The math of feeding 10 billion people only works if we farm the ocean
Even for marketing puffery, "only" seems reductive when most resource usage seems specific to a few animal products like cows and lamb:
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
cameron_b
As a home aquaponics grower, I am really interested in the opportunity to develop tools that help this industry grow smarter. The impact to open-water fisheries can be undone if the markets can be affected to appreciate farm-raised fish for their quality.
I think there is such an incredible opportunity in the sector, and it probably looks a lot like any of the other sectors that have been augmented by data - gather giant piles of any measurable detail, and hope that after filtering you see a pattern that doesn't depend on your production environment running as many sensors ( or tensors ).
Last Thought: Fish transfer pumps are not only a thing, but one of the best ways to have the whole pond population march past your camera in a lighting environment where you have more control.
Have you familiarized yourself with Whooshh Innovations? They have been operating in this space for over a decade and have solved many of these problems. It is an interesting space for sure! Best of luck!
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Serginusa
Really impressive stack — especially the quantization workflow with TensorRT/INT8 on Jetsons. We've been dealing with similar tradeoffs (speed vs segmentation accuracy) in other domain:
Curious — how many labeled fish images did you need before the quantized models stopped falling apart in production?
(Also, for anyone tracking W26, we've got OctaPulse on our prediction market:
ingene.win/?utm_source=hn_comment&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mar2026)
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lcnlvrz
Great product!
I wonder how do you manage data labeling? Do you outsource it by using data label vendors or do you have something in-house?
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dogclaw
Shinkei was for the rich; you guys make it for all
> Something that surprised us early on: only a tiny fraction of farmed fish species have been through genetic improvement programs. Chickens grow 4x faster than they did in 1950 because of decades of selective breeding.
I agree that there is an opportunity here for getting more calories per fish (and especially per input of feed, which is really what decades of chicken optimization are about). But the consequences of these changes for chicken welfare have been disastrous [0] and we're seeing a concerted effort to move to higher-welfare breeds (though still more efficient than ancestral breeds). Likewise, intensive salmon farming has led to widespread '“environmental dewilding,” or the process of modifying natural water bodies with artificial infrastructure — in this case, fish farm pens and cages — and polluting them' [1]. It sounds like there are lots of ways in which using more robots can make monitoring less-invasive, and therefore less stressful for fish. I certainly hope to see those attributes, rather than the potentially disastrous ones, emphasized as you move forward.
[0] https://www.ciwf.org/programmes/better-chicken/
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/468348/atlantic-salmon-fa...
> The math of feeding 10 billion people only works if we farm the ocean
Even for marketing puffery, "only" seems reductive when most resource usage seems specific to a few animal products like cows and lamb: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
As a home aquaponics grower, I am really interested in the opportunity to develop tools that help this industry grow smarter. The impact to open-water fisheries can be undone if the markets can be affected to appreciate farm-raised fish for their quality.
I think there is such an incredible opportunity in the sector, and it probably looks a lot like any of the other sectors that have been augmented by data - gather giant piles of any measurable detail, and hope that after filtering you see a pattern that doesn't depend on your production environment running as many sensors ( or tensors ).
Last Thought: Fish transfer pumps are not only a thing, but one of the best ways to have the whole pond population march past your camera in a lighting environment where you have more control.
https://www.miprcorp.com/fish-pumping/ - just one example with decent pictures
This is an awesome concept. Thanks for sharing.
Have you had any issues with turbidity so far?
Have you familiarized yourself with Whooshh Innovations? They have been operating in this space for over a decade and have solved many of these problems. It is an interesting space for sure! Best of luck!
Really impressive stack — especially the quantization workflow with TensorRT/INT8 on Jetsons. We've been dealing with similar tradeoffs (speed vs segmentation accuracy) in other domain:
Curious — how many labeled fish images did you need before the quantized models stopped falling apart in production?
(Also, for anyone tracking W26, we've got OctaPulse on our prediction market: ingene.win/?utm_source=hn_comment&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mar2026)
Great product!
I wonder how do you manage data labeling? Do you outsource it by using data label vendors or do you have something in-house?
Shinkei was for the rich; you guys make it for all
The fish cursor is cute, but extremely annoying.