
Utilizing Root Cause Analysis to Prevent, Monitor, and Control SRS in Aquaculture Fisheries
Overview: Finding a SRS Monitoring Solution
Modern aquaculture farms face new challenges yearly, including salmon rickettsial septicaemia (SRS) outbreaks. This disease costs the aquaculture industry millions in economic losses every year. To combat SRS, fisheries throughout Chile and Canada increasingly rely on antibiotics to prevent the spread of disease.
Vaxxinova Chile announced that it had released a new vaccine solution to Chile’s SRS epidemic. However, vaccines aren’t always enough, and fisheries can accidentally overuse them. To protect their stocks, fisheries management teams must identify possible causes of SRS outbreaks and use advanced aquaculture monitoring tools to continuously track and fine-tune triggers against this deadly disease.

Challenge: The Need for SRS Prevention Tools
Infectious disease prevention and control are essential in the aquaculture industry. SRS can cause massive fish fatalities, costing fisheries millions in lost revenue. SRS’s mortality rates averaged 20% during the 18-month production time to harvest and were attributed to more than 10% of all Atlantic salmon mortality rates in 2021.
Fisheries rely on SRS monitoring solutions to protect their fish and their profits. However, manual processes such as water quality controls are time-consuming and prone to human errors. This opens the doors for more SRS-related risks.
Aquaculture farms need better ways to continuously control and prevent the spread of current SRS strains and new mutations.

Solution: Preventing the Spread of SRS through Data Analytics
Fisheries are actively seeking a SRS prevention solution, and finding a prevention solution that is also a SRS monitoring solution is vital.
Fish farmers leverage Sightline EDM and its aquaculture intelligence tools to streamline disease prevention processes, reduce fish fatality rates, and optimize efficiency.
Sightline EDM’s advanced platform leverages machine learning to automate data collection, precisely capture all data points, and send real-time alerts before a potential outbreak that causes extreme, negative impacts can occur.
The pisciculture industry can access live, subsecond data that allows numerous farmers to simultaneously analyze thousands of metrics from hundreds of sources with historian context, making Sightline EDM the ideal solution to optimize SRS prevention in complex cage systems, net pens, recirculating systems, and more.
Sightline EDM helps fisheries optimize their disease prevention processes by:
- Automating quality control to increase productivity and save time, money, and resources
- Using AI to deliver relevant information faster than manual processes
- Merging current situations with historical data patterns to accurately forecast environmental quality conditions and a fishery’s risk of SRS outbreaks
- Combining historical automated sensor data and labor-specific data with current occurrences to precisely and accurately predict future occurrences
While data capture may already exist in aquaculture operations, an analytical platform—machine learning and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) functionalities—will help build the relations between data and exceptions against parameters related to SRS outbreaks.
With data points for all sensors throughout the hatchery and fishery, Sightline EDM’s advanced data analytics collects and analyzes the cause of SRS, leading to true prevention.

Results: Aquaculture Monitoring Tools with Proven Results
As Sightline’s experienced group of consultants support the implementation of collection, parameters, alerts, and post-alert scenarios within the Sightline platform, fisheries overcome the SRS crisis. With added monthly support calls to help fish farmers revise the progress within the analysis, Sightline EDM completes the optimization of disease prevention processes and stays one step ahead of future outbreaks.
Fisheries realize additional benefits of advanced data analytics as predictive analytics and machine learning enhances disease control processes by:
- Reducing waste and antibiotic usage, thus saving additional money
- Improving water quality and environmental conditions, thus decreasing kill off
- Optimizing fish health, thus increasing fish growth and reproduction rates
Sightline’s real-time data and aquaculture monitoring tools start working in minutes to improve fishery conditions instantly. The intuitive platform is easy to use, allowing all team members to do their part to prevent SRS outbreaks.Fish farmers and the aquaculture industry have found their key SRS prevention solution.