Fish being trained to catch themselves

BOSTON — Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time.

If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be har­vested when they hear the signal.

What’s next, teaching them to coat themselves in batter and hop inside a fryer?

“It sounds crazy, but it’s real,” said Simon Miner, a research assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood’s Hole, which received a $270,000 grant for the project from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Miner said the specially trained fish could someday be used to bolster the depleted black sea bass stock. Farmed fish might become better acclimated to the wild if they can be called back for food every few days.

The bigger goal is to defray the costs of fish farming, an increasingly important source of the world’s seafood. If fish can be trained to return to the farmer after feeding in the open ocean for several days, farms could save money on feed and reduce the amount of fish waste released in concentrated areas.

The key question for fish farmers: How many fish will actually return, and how many will be lost to predators or simply swim away?

Randy MacMillan, president of the National Aquaculture Association, said fish farmers won’t be easily convinced to adopt open-ocean ranching.

“The commercial side is going to be skeptical,” said MacMillan, who works on a trout farm in Idaho.

The Massachusetts project is one of several experiments funded by the federal government last year as part of aquaculture research.

“We’re looking for innovations that will actually make a difference for coastal communities and the environment,” said Michael Rubino, NOAA Aqua­culture manager. “It fits in both.”

Prior experiments have used sound to train a fish to feed — similar to what Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov did in his famous dogs that salivated at the sound of a bell, expecting food.

In Japan, scientists have used sound to keep newly released farmed fish in certain areas, where they could be caught in traditional ways.

But no one has ever tried to get fish to leave and return to an enclosure where they can be scooped up.

The project began last summer using 6,500 black sea bass, a stout, bottom-dwelling fish that lives between Florida and Cape Cod and in the winter is generally not found north of New Jersey. The species grows up to 3 pounds and 20 inches long and has a thick, white flesh that can be filleted for broiling or cut into nuggets for frying.