Sound May Teach Fish to Catch Themselves

By May, researchers hope to bring about 5,000 black sea bass to a feeding station called an "AquaDome," a structure about 33 feet across and 16 feet high that will be anchored to the ocean floor in Buzzards Bay, 45 miles southeast of Boston.

The sea bass will be fed in the dome after a tone sounds. After researchers feel they've been sufficiently trained, they will be freed from the dome. A day or two later, scientists will sound the tone again and see how many bass return. They'll do the experiment again around summer's end.

The tone will have a range of about 100 meters in every direction. Miner said sea bass are a territorial fish that prefer a rocky bottom, like in Buzzards Bay, where they can forage for food. He doesn't think they will stray too far from the dome.

MacMillan is not convinced the fish won't just swim away.

"My experience with fish is they will wander far and wide," he said.

MacMillan said getting farmed fish to supplement their diets with ocean feeding is intriguing, but farmed fish now get a steady diet that produces reliable growth.

He also expects large numbers of released fish to be lost to predators.

Scott Lindell, the project leader, said losing fish is a concern. But the savings of using the trained fish and the AquaDome is potentially huge: Even if only half the fish come back after reaching market size, the operation would be more profitable than current methods. The dome, for instance, is 10 times cheaper than a standard aquaculture sea cage.

Miner said real answers won't start coming until the fish hit Buzzards Bay this spring. "There's probably 18,000 ways for it to go wrong and only one way to go right."