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John Ogle’s Biofloc System

On August 9, 2011, I interviewed John Ogle, who recently retired from the University
of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory. In 1989, as a research
associate in fisheries and shrimp aquaculture at the lab, John embarked on a two-
decade long series of experiments on a very simple form of biofloc shrimp farming.
His goal: to create a shrimp farming system that would be profitable in the United
States.

When I interviewed John in 2004, he talked about his first experience with bioflocs
and described his culture system:

Edited Excerpts from the 2004 Interview

Shrimp News: When did you begin looking at bacterial flocs as a tool in shrimp
farming?

John Ogle: In 1989, we were running experiments on all kinds of filtration systems,
and we weren’t particularly happy with any of them. Out of frustration, in November
1989, we stocked a raceway that had no filters with Penaeus vannamei—just to see
what would happen. We ran an airline down the middle of the raceway, and in about
30 days we had bacterial floc. We knew what it was because it’s the same type of
floc that appears in sewage treatment lagoons. Our raceways actually produced a
light floc that we called fluff.

That was our first experience with floc, and we have been using it as a biofilter ever
since. We even designed and built a new building to study its use as a biofilter. In
fact, we don’t use any other kind of filter. We even use floc in our shrimp nurseries.

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Shrimp News: In your first trials, how much aeration did you use?

John Ogle: We used a one-inch pipe with holes drilled in it and ran it on a little
Sweetwater L-20 Blower. Oxygen levels stayed high, from 4 to 12 parts per million,
averaging around 6 ppm. At production densities, these systems remained stable
for about 12 weeks, but as the shrimp grew larger, oxygen levels dropped and
growth slowed. We lost a tank that was in production for 22 weeks and contained
25-gram shrimp. The load was so high that the oxygen dropped and we lost them.
Some of our zero-exchange, floc-filter systems have been running for a year, and
the shrimp are still perking along. The floc is so thick you can almost scoop it out
with a fish net. What we’re trying to find out now is what levels of floc are ideal for
shrimp farming, and then we plan to build a system that takes advantage of those
levels.

August 9, 2011, Interview

Shrimp News: When I interviewed you, back in 2004, you were very optimistic
about the results that you were getting from some of your first experiments with
bioflocs. Does that optimism continue today?

John Ogle: There may have been some inherent flaws in the floc system that we
developed, but I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I want to describe the traditional
zero-exchange system so that you understand the difference between it and my
system.

With traditional zero-exchange systems, you have a tank for your animals, another
tank where you remove the solids, and a couple of supplemental tanks to remove
dissolved organics and disinfect the water. Add a big biological filter and all the
pumps to keep the system running and you’ve got an expensive, complicated
system that can be more difficult to manage than your shrimp. There can be from
one to five pumps on these systems, plus an air pump. All of them can fail and
cause the system to fail.

Shrimp News: Tell me about your biofloc system?

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John Ogle: The system that I designed was really simple, just a tank and an airline,
eliminating all the pumps and all the water treatment equipment. Tank space is
devoted to growout, not equipment. When you put vannamei into a tank with oxygen
and feed, you get flocs, and the flocs become the surface material that nitrifying
bacteria grow on. The flocs become your filter. No external filters needed. These
systems are low cost and easy to operate, so we were really got excited about them.

Then, we began to run into problems—stability and variability problems. When we

I think the shrimp were growing faster and producing waste products faster than the
bacteria in the flocs could multiply to process them. When the shrimp began
excreting waste products into the tank, ammonia levels in the tank increased and
ammonia-reducing bacteria sprang to life and reduced them in a week, or so. As the
ammonia decreased, nitrites increased, but, in my opinion, the nitrite-reducing
bacteria could not reproduce quickly enough to keep up with the increasing nitrite
levels, which quickly rose to toxic levels, killing the shrimp and crashing the tank.
The shrimp were growing faster than the bacteria. In our trials, sixty to seventy
percent of our tanks crashed because of high nitrite levels. Thirty to forty percent of
the time the nitrite-reducing bacteria kicked in, the nitrites came down, and the
shrimp grew and prospered.

We had other problems. One, we could not precondition the water. With a
traditional biofilter, you can get it up and running before you stock your animals, but
you can’t do that with a biofloc filter. We tried inoculating tanks with existing flocs,
but that did not work very well because shrimp seem to be essential to the
production of the floc. We tried starting tanks without shrimp by just adding shrimp
feed, but no flocs developed. There seems to be a synergistic relationship between
the shrimp and floc production. Maybe the shrimp just helped keep all the debris
that would have normally settled on the pond bottom suspended in the water
column.

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Shrimp News: Why were some tanks successful and other not?

John Ogle: We were never able to explain why most of the tanks failed. We still
think of ourselves as shrimp farmers, but with these biofloc systems we’re basically
growing bacteria in a single-cell-protein reactor, and the shrimp are just kind of along
for the ride. Scientists grow bacteria in bioreactors that are held under rigorous
temperature, pH and nutrients controls. They can keep one species of bacteria
under control and produce and harvest it. A shrimp tank is a long throw from a
bioreactor. Light levels and temperatures are constantly changing in shrimp tanks,
and we aren’t dealing with one species of bacteria like they are with bioreactors,
we’re dealing with an untold number of bacteria species that we know very little
about.

In addition, protozoans, worms, nematodes and rotifers live in the flocs. You’ve got
this huge mix of critters, and it just may not be possible to control all their life cycles
at one time. You’re trying to manage a complex ecosystem. If your conditions were
constant, maybe it would be possible to control it, but your conditions are changing
all the time. Temperatures are going up and down all the time. Light and pH levels
change constantly. The ecology of the flocs is changing. And that’s your filter. And
then your shrimp are growing, and their increasing amounts of wastes are constantly
changing everything.

Not only do the right bacterial species have to get established in the tank, but they
also have to be able to increase their populations in concert with the increased
nitrogen load from the shrimp. All of this seems to work within the traditional biofilter,
so someone has suggested that nitrite-reducing bacteria might prefer the solid
substrate of a biofilter to the floating substrate in a biofloc. Maybe that’s why our
system did not work. We were trying to control something that we didn’t completely
understand. We really knew very little about the bacteria populations in our tanks.
Even if we knew what was going on in one tank at a particular point in time,
everything would begin changing the next moment and continue changing the next
day, the next week and the next month. That’s in a single tank. After we got our
new building, we were working with twelve tanks. Trying to get all those tanks on the
same page was impossible. Something different was almost always going on in
every tank.

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Because of biosecurity regulations at our facility, we had to sterilized all our
experimental tanks and water with bleach, so we were basically starting with zero-
bacteria tanks. When we put shrimp and feed into those tanks, we were probably
“seeded” the tanks with a different bacterial population every time.

Shrimp News: What do you think of the biofloc systems that use lots of aeration and
an additional source of carbon—frequently sugar—to stimulate bacterial activity?

John Ogle: The problem with those systems is that you’re adding sugar, which is
relatively cheap, but in some cases—pound for pound—you can be adding almost
as much sugar as feed. And that gets expensive. Once the shrimp start growing,
the oxygen consumption goes way up. In some cases, you have to use huge
amounts of pure oxygen. That’s very, very expensive. In addition, the disposal of all
the floc material becomes a problem. How do you get rid of all the floc? We’re
producing huge amounts of single-cell protein, and then we throw it all away. We
actually have to pay someone to get rid of it. Maintaining and balancing these
systems with sugar, feed and shrimp gets very expensive and that’s why they are not
delivering on their original promise. They’re more stable than the floc system I was
working on, but now I think it’s time to re-visit the traditional closed system, the
clearwater system.

Information: John Ogle (email: [email protected]).

Source: John Ogle. Interview by Bob Rosenberry, Shrimp News International,

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