The Future of Fish Feed - Kepley BioSystems Speaks at the World's Leading Aquaculture Sustainability Conference in San Francisco
Kepley BioSystems (KBI) will be participating by invitation this week in the annual F3 (Future of Fish Feed) Meeting to be held from February 19 – 22, 2019, at the San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront. With a mission to accelerate the replacement of fishmeal and fish oil with innovative alternatives, this year’s theme, “F3: Companies Got Talent,” focuses on industry perspectives and progress toward substitutes for fishmeal and/or fish oil in aquaculture feeds.
The KBI team has developed an alternative aquaculture feed that delivers optimized nutrient formulations in a worm-based “capsule” with a patent-pending approach to a recirculating aquafarm cultivation system. Dr. Anthony Dellinger, KBI president, will be highlighting this and related work during an F3 panel discussion on Wednesday, February 20, 2019, at 3:00PM (PST).
In addition to alternatives to fish ingredients in aquaculture feed, with federal grant funding from the National Science Foundation, the KBI team has invented a patent-pending, synthetic bait to attract and trap lobster and crab for use in crustacean fishing. The industry spends $20 billion annually in the global capture and utilization of some 40 billion pounds of bait fish. This synthetic product, OrganoBait™, incorporates naturally occurring molecules to mimic the attractant properties of forage fish, without the use of fish or other animal byproducts. Upon full commercialization, OrganoBait would provide a sustainable, environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and consistently available alternative to “wasting” fish to catch fish – while helping to avert ocean ecosystem collapse from overfishing, especially using drift-net practices.
KBI is also currently fulfilling another Phase I aquatic research study funded by the National Science Foundation to help protect fragile, wild populations of horseshoe crabs (HSCs). By “ranching” them, the KBI goal is to eliminate the need to capture increasingly threatened wild HSCs to harvest their unique, copper-infused blood for biomedical sterility testing. Its sensitivity to endotoxins is unmatched in ensuring the safety of injectable medicine and implantable devices for millions of patients worldwide, every year.
“We are honored to participate in the 2019 F3 meeting,” said Dellinger. “It’s exciting to join such a stellar group of researchers and enterprises dedicated to innovation toward more sustainable fishing and aquaculture practices.”
About F3
Launched in 2015, Future of Fish Feed (F3) is a collaborative effort between NGOs, researchers, and private partnerships to accelerate the commercialization of innovative, alternative aquaculture feed ingredients to replace wild-caught fish. Past feeds have relied on wild-caught fish, which is unsustainable since wild caught stocks are declining. The annual F3 meeting is the world’s leading showcase of new, sustainable ingredients for aquaculture.