Division of Fisheries Science

Over past three decades Fisheries Science Division has its focus on addressing the issues related to aquaculture, capture fisheries resources and impact of climate change on coastal bio-resources. During the first decade (1978-88), the primary focus was on cataloguing the fisheries resources and understanding the fisheries potential of the islands, which could be attributed to the origin of the division from CMFRI. Subsequently, in the next decade (1988-98), comprehensive efforts were taken to study the aquaculture potential – freshwater and mariculture by experimenting and improvising the different fish culture methods from the mainland based on the island conditions. During the third decade (1998-2008), significant efforts were undertaken for costal bio-resource characterization with special reference to climate change. The main focus of the fourth decade ever since the inception of the institute, has been on consolidation of the research efforts on aquaculture, resource management, biodiversity characterization and utilization by using high-end space and molecular tools.
The division has its headquarters at Garacharma main campus, a full-fledged research laboratory at Marine hill campus to carry out biodiversity/resource management studies and mariculture activities and a brackish water fish farm complex at Sippighat and freshwater complex at Bloomsdale farm. The division has developed technologies that has addressed the welfare of fishermen community and fish farmers of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The divisional scientists share a great rapport in research and extension activities with Andaman Administration, Krishi Vigyan Kendra to validate/demonstrate the technologies. The division has collaborated with many external funding / research agencies like DBT, SAC, INCOIS, ILS, ISRO-RRC etc to carry out research with specific needs of the islands.
The division has a sanctioned strength of 7 scientists, five of them with Fisheries Resource Management specialization; one each with aquaculture and fish processing specialization. At present, two scientists with specialization in Fisheries Resource Management (FRM) are working on broadly three major research areas viz., Coastal bio-resource management, aquaculture and capture fisheries with the aim to improve the productivity of Island fisheries.