Towards sustainable, antibiotic-free shrimp farming in the Mekong delta, Vietnam

The context of the present project is the reduction of the dispersal of ARGs into the environment issued from shrimp culture basins in the Mekong Delta, Viet Nam. Bacterial resistances to ABs are generated by the indiscriminate use of these compounds for fighting against pathogenic bacterial outbreaks. However, these outbreaks are favored by the low quality of the basins' water, in which high loads of organic matter are being released for the intensive nourishment of the animals. Improving the chemical quality of the basins is then mandatory, so that in turn the need for ABs would be reduced equally. At the same time, remaining traces of ABs and ARGs should be removed before their releases in the adjacent natural environment. In the present project, the envisaged solution is a recirculation system, integrated in continuous mode to the shrimp basins, combining the effectiveness of a horizontal subsurface flow CW, with plants and a final UV disinfection procedure. The objectives of the present project are i) to design and to model the effectiveness of a horizontal subsurface flow CW, coupled with simple purification add-ons, such as UV disinfection and initial swirl filter, for the treatment of the water quality of shrimp culture basins and ii) to build and test a small-scale model added to already existing shrimp basins running in controlled laboratory conditions.