Abstract: China's aquaculture industry develops rapidly in recent years, but most of the aquaculture environmental monitoring is still in the level of traditionally relying on artificial experience, and its cost is high and efficiency is low, and has been unable to meet the demand of the current development of aquaculture. This paper, based on ZigBee wireless sensor network technology, designed a kind of energy-efficient aquaculture environmental monitoring system to monitor the water temperature, pH value, dissolved oxygen concentration and turbidity parameters. The paper designed the wireless sensor node using CC2530 as the core processor, designed the A/D conversion module and RF (radio frequency) module by using A/D conversion function and RF function of CC2530, and designed the signal conditioning circuit based on electrochemical sensor. The system supplied electricity for wireless sensor nodes using the 9 V lithium battery to realize the wireless system, developed the node application program using the open source protocol stack Z-stack to improve the system stability and reliability, developed the local user monitoring interface and remote monitoring site using the mixed programming mode of C/S and B/S, constructed the dynamic self-organizing network based on the mesh topology, prolonged the survival time of node using time-sharing and subarea power supply mode and data fusion technology. The paper established the mathematical model from the power of the node modules, and then put forward a kind of energy-saving technology from the 2 aspects of hardware and software. After the design of the node, the paper verified the theoretical calculation through laboratory experiment and field experiment. In laboratory, the comparison experiment of 4 types of schemes of the system energy consumption was carried out. Laboratory tests showed that it doubled the life of nodes when using the time-sharing and subarea power supply for each module of the node. It prolonged the life of node by about 50 h when reducing the amount of data transmission to sink node. The result showed that the electrochemical sensor and signal conditioning circuit used in the system have become the dominant factors of the sensor node power consumption, and the data transmission capacity has become the secondary factor. In order to improve the accuracy of the measurement of the aquaculture parameters, and not lose the useful information, after the analysis of laboratory test data, the best plan was chosen and the experiment was carried out in the field. In the field, system worked for 3 months. Then, the discharge test of the lithium battery of the nodes was carried out. The result showed that the remaining energy of the 12 sensor nodes was about 66% of the total energy, that of the 3 routing nodes was about 47% of the total energy and that of the 1 routing node was about 33% of the total energy. The results of the field test were consistent with the laboratory, and the energy-saving technology was practicable. Therefore, the system has the advantages of low power consumption, stable operation, long network lifetime, and so on. It can realize the real-time monitoring of aquaculture environment, and has the very good market prospect and promotion value.