As a collective of post-graduate students and early career researchers in aquaculture, we are conscious that we represent, at best, only the views and experiences of students from one university in the northern part of East China. We are also aware of the incredible diversity of aquaculture and academic realities across the world. In this editorial, we attempt to summarise our career motivations, hopes, aspirations, and concerns. These may be similar to those of other post-graduate students in different parts of the world, or perhaps not, as country, industrial, academic, or cultural differences may play a significant role in shaping the experiences of post-graduate students in aquaculture globally. The senior co-author of this editorial, GMT (Editor-in-Chief of Reviews in Aquaculture) recently visited our university and laboratories. After numerous conversations and discussions, he challenged us to share our views. The task was not simple, as we had only one week to draft this editorial. Nevertheless, we embraced this opportunity gratefully, hoping that fellow post-graduate students and early career researchers worldwide would find these words interesting and resonating with their own experiences. Most importantly, we would be delighted to receive your feedback and engage in a conversation where we can all share our views and experiences, broadening our understanding and, ideally, helping one another while expanding our network.

The motivations behind our choice to pursue post-graduate qualifications in aquaculture vary. Some of us entered aquaculture due to unplanned coincidences and unexpected events in our lives, while others were drawn in by direct knowledge and passion. Regardless of the paths that led us here, we all now view aquaculture as one of the most sustainable, fastest-growing, and dynamic food production sectors globally, with significant potential for further expansion. Approximately 15 million km² of the Earth's 148 million km² of land are arable. However, due to severe deforestation and desertification caused by overcultivation, the arable land area is rapidly shrinking.¹ As such, to contribute to global food security, we are fully committed to developing marine fisheries and aquaculture. As post-graduate students and early career researchers in aquaculture, we have clear goals and are always motivated to work hard.

As young people engaged in the aquaculture industry, we are pleased with our career choice, because there are good employment opportunities in the sector, even though we may still struggle with the decision about our specific future career directions, after graduation. In general, we have three options after graduation: entering university/research institute to continue scientific research; engaging in aquaculture-related enterprises to provide technical support; or joining in government departments, such as, for example, aquaculture technology promotion stations. All good choices, but we certainly feel that the bar to became an aquaculture-related professional, no matter in which direction, is getting higher and higher. Some of us even believe that pursuing a PhD is no longer a choice, but almost an essential prerequisite to access the job market. At the same time, more and more senior individuals who have been in the aquaculture industry for many years come to our laboratory to pursue graduate degrees to make themselves more competitive in their careers. For some of us, the motivation to pursue further studies comes from personal interest and the hope that improving our academic qualifications will provide us with more choices and broaden our career opportunities. Furthermore, some of us aspire to become leading talents in aquaculture research industry, while others aspire to become teachers and educators, driven by pure passion for scientific research. Potential income and job security are also important considerations that provide additional layers to our many thoughts and concerns. We realise that our motivations and aspirations might be different from each other, and this diversity is one of the positive aspects of our cohort experience, allowing us to share within our peers. For those of us who have not systematically considered future choices, understanding the thoughts of our peers inspires us to form our own. For those of us who are still confused, understanding the thoughts of our peers can help us clarify our own choices.

When it comes to improving the competitiveness of aquatic industry professionals, we feel the need to significantly broaden our horizons and continue to strive for innovation. The vast marine resources available for aquaculture have not yet been fully developed and explored. To pursue our aspirations, many of us have had, will have, or hope to have, the opportunity to spend some time overseas for part or all of our post-graduate education or early career employment. As non-native speakers of English, we are challenged to travel abroad not only to foster our English skills, nowadays necessary for any scientific based career, but also to develop a better understanding of different scientific research systems and approaches. Besides, we need to enrich our main research content by fostering an expanded network and learning from other disciplines. One of our biggest concerns when looking into our future, regarding our studies, scholarships, opportunities to travel abroad, and then job opportunities as well, is that we know we need to compete with many excellent people, often our peers and friends, for exams, assessment tasks, selection criteria, and interviews, and having an academic qualification is no longer sufficient. Often, having several high-quality research publications will be necessary to be successful, either in academia or even in industry. Therefore, we think it is necessary for our field to systematically inform students and young academics about the careers they can choose in the future and the effective ways they can achieve their pursuits when they first enter school or come into contact with this industry. This can be achieved by adding a basic course to the teaching program but should also be part of mentorship from our senior colleagues. We think it would be better to embark in this explorative journey and possible training sooner, rather than later, for example in our sophomore and junior years. However, we most commonly start to worry about these issues when we are about to graduate, and when the urgent pressure of graduation and finding employment force us to make some hasty or drifting decisions.

We believe that selecting the right program and mentor are crucial, and these aspects are generally within our control. Amongst these decisions, the consideration of travelling overseas for part, or all, of our studies is often central and at times contentious. The decision is often based only on recommendations from mentors and senior graduates, but lacking some personal, subjective understanding and practical experience inspection. We are aware that internationalisation is pivotal for the sector, as well as for our careers. We know that through knowledge sharing, cooperative research, and scientific communication, scientific progress can be promoted to solve global problems for the benefit of the whole human society. We know that the modern aquaculture industry requires professionals with comprehensive, multifaceted cross-disciplinary expertise, knowledge, and advanced skills. We know that access to cutting-edge research in different fields, as well as learning more advanced research techniques, scientific theories, and approaches will be instrumental in successfully facing the future challenges of our sector. We know that science knows no borders. Aquaculture knows no borders too. But we also know that leaving everything behind, travelling to other countries, and often investing also significant amount of money, to embark in a study program abroad is not as simple as it might be seen from outside. Accordingly, we hope that there will be more programs and opportunities for university students to travel abroad. It is not always necessary to have a 3–5 year post-graduate program, and shorter options and small projects, such as summer camps and semester exchanges, could be beneficial, and more readily accessible to more students before graduation. These experiences would then be greatly beneficial for us to choose international study programs and mentors after graduation. International exchanges are very important not only for individuals. In fact, after post-graduate study abroad, often in parallel fields, many senior colleagues who returned to China have brought their new insights and accumulated knowledge and expertise back to aquaculture research, greatly promoting and expanding the development of the field as well as our laboratory. On the other hand, as one of the countries with the most developed aquaculture industry and research sector, we also advocate and welcome more international students to come to China for exchange. Our laboratory, for example, has scholars from different countries (Bangladesh, Nigeria, South Korea, etc.) to exchange ideas, benefiting us greatly and making us very proud.

Aquaculture is a sector that requires substantial innovation, improvement, development, and refinement. This is necessary to counteract some of the current unsustainable and economically questionable practices and to adapt to environmental change, degradation, climate change-related phenomena, and competition for resources from other sectors. It is a pivotal food industry for the future of the world, a reality where we can have an impact, and a sector that will undoubtedly require many qualified professionals in the future. The ultimate objective of aquaculture is to generate nutritious, safe, and tasty food for a growing global population, generate wealth, and ideally contribute to the protection of our environment. These shared objectives bring together aquaculture professionals worldwide. As young academics, we should continue to learn and improve ourselves while also always paying attention to social issues, such as, for example, food safety, animal welfare, consumer preferences, and labour rights, well-being and wealth distribution, diversity and inclusion, and trying to transform basic research and applied research results into means to solve real social problems. We believe in the benefits of more communication and cooperation platforms. For instance, aquaculture-related practitioners have spontaneously established online chat rooms, where researchers share the latest results, enterprises showcase the newly developed feed products, agencies release fluctuating prices of marine products, various new policies on food safety, and thoughtful forecasts for daily typhoons and weather for farmers, and farmers share their feedback on practical applications. Each member can find potential cooperation opportunities and ways to help themselves solve problems through the association. Although every person in the aquaculture industry can only focus on the development of a certain discrete specific area, they will always care for, and contribute to, the overall positive future development of the broader field. Accordingly, for us, post-graduate students and early career researchers, Reviews in Aquaculture is often an important starting point for our studies, as well as a target and an aspirational goal for a possible future publication. By reading Reviews in Aquaculture, we can deepen our knowledge in our specific topic area of focus, but it also helps us broaden our horizons by providing us with accessible and high-quality information about progress in other areas, so that we can learn from other disciplines. In this issue, we discovered several compelling articles, with the following three reviews particularly catching our interest.

Wu et al.² reviewed how dietary lipids affect microbiota and how microbiota affects lipid metabolism in fish. We think this is a very important topic that is now receiving the deserved research attention, but still, there are many things to be better understood, and thus it is a topic that allows for important and exciting future research activities. Moving from nutrition to advanced innovative technologies, we enjoyed the article by Ben-Asher et al.³ about electrochemical water treatment for recirculating aquaculture systems, and the article by Li et al.⁴ about acoustic technology and its potential utilisation in aquaculture. Though we are a group of post-graduate students and early career researchers primarily working on biological aspects and nutrition, we enjoyed reading about how novel technologies can be implemented in aquaculture to improve overall on-farm performances and efficiency.

We hope our editorial, where we shared some of our thoughts, hopes, and concerns about our studies and future careers, will be of interest to readers of this new issue of Reviews of Aquaculture. We hope other peers from around the world would like to interact with us for a greater exchange and learning from each other. And, to conclude, we also hope readers will, like us, enjoy the many high-quality reviews published in this first issue of 2024.