After missing last year’s event, it was a pleasure to reconnect with old colleagues and meet new ones in Valencia. This year’s conference brought me some selection bias on my topic: innovation often comes from the edges, not the center.

Signals From Adjacent Fields

Several conversations highlighted how technologies from seemingly unrelated sectors are edging into aquaculture:

- Soil-monitoring drones from agriculture adapted to float and survey aquaculture sites.

- Fishing gear re-imagined to harvest plankton as feed for hatcheries.

- Municipal wastewater treatment re-engineered for nutrient capture inside recirculating systems.

- Nanobubble applications gaining traction for oxygenation and biosecurity.

These crossovers are exciting, but they also underline how self-contained I, as an aquaculture professional, can be. Too often I stay in my own bubble, iterating on the same set of tools.

A Call to Look Outward

For ChimanaTech, the next step is clear: we need to attend conferences that have little—or nothing—obviously to do with aquaculture. Energy, water tech, sensors, materials science, even space and architecture all hold potential links. Our role is to surface those links early and translate them into opportunities for our clients and partners.

RAS Session Highlights

I had the privilege of co-chairing the Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) session, which focused on what I like to call the elephant in the room of RAS—especially marine RAS: end-of-pipe (EoP) treatment.

The key takeaways, for those interested:

- EoP treatment adds unavoidable cost—cost that open systems often “outsource” to the environment.

- There’s interest in removing nutrients within the loop to shrink the EoP footprint.

- New concepts aim to turn EoP setups into revenue generators, such as cultivating plants or seaweeds with captured nutrients.

The session reinforced how much work remains to optimize these processes and how critical they are to the economics of future closed-loop systems.

Catalyzing AquaSnow’s Market Reach

This conference was also an important milestone for AquaSnow, the innovative live-feed replacement diet that ChimanaTech has been helping bring to market.

Our work together goes beyond technical advice:

- Business development: engaging potential partners and early adopters directly at the conference.

- Positioning and outreach: making sure AquaSnow’s breakthrough trials reached the right stakeholders. If you missed the poster, you can download it here.

- Market intelligence: gathering feedback from hatchery managers, feed companies, and equipment suppliers to refine the go-to-market plan.

Seeing interest from major players confirmed that AquaSnow’s technology is resonating. For ChimanaTech, it’s proof that our model (combining technical insight with hands-on business development) delivers tangible traction.

Chimana’s Next Moves

Our perspective coming out of Valencia is straightforward:

- Collaborate with early-stage businesses we met at the conference.

- Accelerate their market entry and expand their reach across geographies.

- Keep scouting adjacent industries, bringing unexpected ideas back to aquaculture.

Next stop: paneling at Blue Ambition conference in Dublin next month!