Adams, Shumway, Whitlatch, and Getchis assembled data from aquaculture operations across six continents to produce a global assessment of biofouling impacts. The study catalogued fouling organisms by geographic region and culture type — finfish cages, bivalve longlines, seaweed rafts — and quantified their effects on production through reduced growth rates, increased mortality, degraded product quality, and elevated operational costs including cleaning, net replacement, and antifouling treatments.
The authors estimated that biofouling adds 5 to 10 percent to total production costs across the global aquaculture industry, with substantially higher burdens in warm-water regions where fouling is continuous. They highlighted that shellfish operations face a fundamentally different challenge from finfish farms: fouling organisms compete directly with the cultured species for food and settlement space, making complete fouling prevention both more critical and more difficult to achieve without harming the crop.
European farmers can contextualise these global findings using the biofouling cost calculator, which applies region-specific fouling pressure data to estimate costs for individual operations. The organisms database maps the dominant fouling species across European waters, and the article on the economic impact of marine biofouling examines how these costs manifest in practice.