Online Course in Fish Welfare

The Institute of Aquaculture are working with partners in Asia to develop a free online course in fish welfare. A first English version is now available and Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian versions are under development. The course is intended to be self-paced and quizzes are available to test understanding. The course is hosted on the UK Open University OpenLearn Create platform where a variety of other aquaculture-related courses can also be found. There are currently five modules which aim to cover the basic principles of fish welfare which underpin the many existing guidelines etc. The materials have a Creative Commons license, so teachers in Asia are welcome to take and adapt materials to use in their own teaching. While the course does not have any formal academic credit, students who enrol and successfully complete the quizzes are able to gain a “badge” which can be displayed on social media or in a CV.

Training Workshops

In June 2024, we held two training workshops for reseach call applicants. One was organised in partnership with the Suranaree University in Bangkok, Thailand, and the other with Can Tho University in Vietnam. Details about these workshops, including copies of presentations and some videos are available here.

A further two “Masterclass” events were held in October 2024 led by Professor Sonia Rey Planellas and Dr Amaya Albalat. These were on 14th October in Ho Chi Minh City and 16th October in Bangkok. Further Details are available here.

In order to introduce the new “Asian Fish Welfare Network” project and further discuss priorities for each project country, a series of workshops were organised. The first was held in Thailand in early November 2025, followed by a second in Nha Trang in Vietnam in late November 2025. The last workshop in this series was held in Surabaya, Indonesia in April 2026.

See our Workshop Events Page for further details.

Journal Club

In September 2024 we launched a “Journal Club”. This is a regular online meeting lasting no more than 1 hour, led by Dr Timothy Wiese. a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Aquaculture. Each session took a single published journal article on some aspect of aquatic animal welfare and opened it up to scrutiy and discussion. The aim was to think about the quality of the research questions, the methodology employed, the analysis and interpretation and what contribution the paper makes to overal animal welfare science. The online meetings were held using Microsoft Teams which also facilitated written chat before, during and after the session. Participation in the Journal Club was open to all researchers, students and practitioners with an interest in aquatic animal welfare research relevant for Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. The club is not currently active, but Further information available via this link.

 Other resources

The following two videos from members of the Welfare team at the Institute of Aquaculture, give a brief overview of aquatic animal welfare issues: