JINAN, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- China's first batch of farmed salmon will hit the market ahead of the Spring Festival, or Chinese Lunar New Year, in February, said the operator of "Shenlan 1," the world's largest fully-submersible fish cage.
The fish farm, located 130 sea miles east of Rizhao City in eastern China's Shandong Province, takes advantage of a cold water mass in the Yellow Sea to cultivate the deep-sea fish species.
The huge steel facility built by Wuchang Shipbuilding Industry Group CO., Ltd., a subsidiary of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, is 35 meters tall, which is roughly as tall as an 11-story building. It measures 180 meters in width, allowing it to accommodate 300,000 salmon.
Since the salmon fry, the stage of growth where the salmon can swim out of gravel, were released into the cage in July, they have survived the harsh summer, according to the Rizhao Wanzefeng Fishing Co., Ltd. The first harvest can be expected at the beginning of the next year.
Chinese consumers have shown a growing appetite for fresh seafood.
"The China-developed fish farm in the cold water mass enables Chinese fishing firms to cultivate seafood with high economic value," said Dong Shuanglin, former deputy head of the China Ocean University.
In addition to the submersible fish cage, Shandong has built 35 floating platforms for fish farming in the sea.
One of the platforms, the Yangguang 1, is equipped with ocean current power generation, sewage water treatment facilities and intelligent control system for making automatic fish farming management.
In 2007, the province's reaped 210 billion yuan (30.2 billion U.S. dollars) in revenues from marine ranching, with more than 100,000 people employed in the industry.
