News How Harmful Algal Blooms Threaten Aquaculture

How Harmful Algal Blooms Threaten Aquaculture: Meet Coralie Picoche and the Team Behind BiOceanOr

2026/07/17

Harmful algal blooms (HAB) are a proliferation of certain microalgae causing significant damage in aquaculture, high fish mortality and major disruptions to onsite operations. They’re a recurring and global risk that the industry tries to handle and mitigate as good as they can with the existing knowledge and tools.

The impact of these HABs on aquaculture amount to approximately 8 $billion a year globally.

In Chile,

in the 2016 austral summer, a bloom of Pseudochattonella verruculosa wiped out around 12% of the country’s salmon production in a few weeks, with losses estimated above US$800 million. This remains the largest fish-killing HAB event ever recorded in the industry, and Chile has faced several more since, in 2021, 2023, and 2024.

In Norway,

in early 2026, a Pseudochattonella bloom tracked north along the coast and killed more than 105,000 salmon across five sites in Rogaland, making it a stark reminder of how severe HAB events can be.

Why This Matters to BiOceanOr

BiOceanOr’s suite of services operates to help control environmental risk. We build environmental intelligence solutions for aquaculture, combining biology, hydrodynamics and artificial intelligence to help fish farmers better understand the water environment in which their fish evolve.

Water quality is affected by both the abiotic conditions like oxygen and temperature, and the biotic ones, like the microorganisms living in it. HAB is therefore part of the challenges the fish farmers need to address, and BiOceanOr helps to better understand and anticipate it.

Meet Coralie, Our Expert on Phytoplankton & HAB

For Coralie Picoche, who has worked for almost ten years on phytoplankton dynamics, now leading our work on HAB as a data scientist:

“HAB can damage fish mechanically by clogging their gills and blocking respiration, but even at low concentrations, some species can still affect them. That’s what makes these events so hard to predict: a low cell count doesn’t always mean low risk. And blooms can build up over days, then suddenly hit a site within hours.”

Discuss with our experts

All Our Expertise Adapted to Real-Life Conditions

BiOceanOr is working to close the gap between scientific and technical expertise and real-life operational conditions. Merging complex data sources and models into actionable insights, we aim to deliver operational tools designed for the day-to-day reality of a site manager.

Coralie and our team of experts point to three things that matter most:

Making the most of all the data already available

Leveraging the latest models and AI capabilities

Adapting to each farmer’s needs, to anticipate risk based on hazard and vulnerability

“We work closer to the farmer, evaluating the presence of HAB, but also how it can actually affect their fish and production, with information that’s easy to understand and act on. That means operational, simple outputs, clear thresholds, and alerts that arrive in time to matter” Coralie comments.