
Salmon Farmers Are Scanning Fish Faces to Fight Killer Lice - classichasclass
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-08/salmon-farmers-are-scanning-fish-faces-to-fight-killer-lice
======
sek
I just watched a nice documentary in German television about it.

The Salmon industry in Norway is a huge billion dollar industry, labor costs
there are high so it's dependent on technology.

It's profitable, but also very competitive and every small edge increases it.
The ingenuity of optimising every step is inspiring.

It's also in the bigger picture pretty ethical, it satisfies the demand for
fish without destroying the natural ecosystems.

~~~
saiya-jin
Do you mean farmed salmon? Aka 'fish' meat which, due to crap the fish are
being fed resembles more pork than wild salmon? Not even talking about the
amount of antibiotics, growth hormones and god knows what other chemistry
pumped into them to get as much $$ as possible.

2 of the most healthy fish to eat on paper are pretty dangerous these days -
tuna due to buildup of mercury and other metals since it is a relatively long-
living predator (you can't avoid this), and farmed salmon due to stuff above.
Maybe a proper wild one is still OK to eat often (and priced accordingly), but
farmed ones are generally subpar food I try to avoid.

~~~
pvaldes
1- Farmed salmon does not receive growth hormones. Is a fish.

The kind of growth hormone that you could find in the market are from mammals
(or humans). I'm not an expert in hormones, but I doubt that fishes could make
anything useful with it.

Farmed salmon are genetically selected, so they grow fast. No need to burn
your hardly earned money chasing and injecting expensive and useless growth
hormones in each one of your 100.000 fishes. Is antieconomic and would be a
really stupid move.

2- Farmed salmon _COULD_ receive antibiotics, as any cattle or poultry do,
_WHEN_ there is a disease that can be treated with antibiotics. Point.

Treating a big mass of open water with antibiotics is really, really
expensive. Giving antibiotics in the food is not easy when you have some
hundred thousands of mouths. As farmers do not have a printing dollars machine
and is their money what is over the table, I bet that they think twice before
to use this weapon and try to cut the medication as soon as possible.

To save antibiotics, and chemicals is the reason for doing the scanning in the
article, so there are room for improving with the use of computers, and they
are actively trying to improve at least.

On the other hand, antibiotics for veterinary use are legal and regulated by
the EU. I bet that the period of days before the fishes can be killed and
somebody could buy this meat in a marketplace is carefully followed by the
farmers. Because is a REGULATED industry in the European Union.

~~~
noselasd
Not everything is as regulated as you make it appear to be. e.g. virtually
every pig farm in Denmark regularly gets antibiotics, and MSRA is found on
pretty much every pig farm.

The average antibiotic use in Europe was 152 mg/kg of livestock a couple of
years ago, with Spain and Cyprus being up in the 4-500 mg/kg.

On the brighter side, Denmark is starting to seriously reduce antibiotic use
in pig farms with a goal of being virtually antibiotic free within 4-5 years.

Norwegian farmed salmon uses virtually no antibiotics, with only 5 of 799
farms performing minor treatments in 2016 . while 20 years ago, pretty much
all farms used regular treatments.

~~~
pvaldes
Salmon is only seriously breed since 1985 (or so). I'm an ex-biologist
'specialized' on parasites and diseases of marine vertebrates, from fishes to
whales and turtles. (Specialist is a big word. Lets say that I spent a few
decades studying it, a few hundred pages of my thesis deal with parasites of
marine farmed fishes... and still feels like a newbie). A lot of things had
improved in our knowledge of marine diseases (and understanding of marine
organisms) in the last twenty years.

The pig is a domesticated animal, breeded since many thousands of years. You
can pick one and give it a shoot of antibiotic. Then release it and will run
happy again.

Marine fishes aren't in the same league. Can be shockingly delicate sometimes
and get badly stressed when caught and put off the water. I have killed many
thousands of them and would not use antibiotics or mess with the tank just
because, without a good reason.

