At 2.09 kg per capita, Atlantic salmon may be the EU’s most consumed farmed species and the bloc’s third most consumed fish overall, but behind the scenes, the main production regions particularly targeting European markets continue to fall foul of the same persistent, naturally-occurring enemy No. 1 – sea lice.
No bigger than a common fly, sea lice cause skin lesions and increase salmon’s susceptibility to infections. They do this by attaching themselves to the fish skin and eating the protective mucus and skin layers, causing wounds and suppressing the immune system. To make matters worse, the parasites have become resistant to most of the pharmaceutical treatments used by the industry.
Although there are no official records citing the actual volumes of farmed salmon lost due to sea lice challenges each year, at the 2016 Humber Seafood Summit, organized by the U.K. Seafish Authority and held in Cleethorpes, U.K., Jonathan Shepherd, former director general at IFFO and non-executive director at Omega Protein, told delegates that the global cost of sea lice control now stands at around USD 584 million (EUR 523.3 million).
Shepherd stressed that the salmon farming industries in both Norway and Scotland were highly responsible and had adopted best-practice throughout, leaving sea lice as the last major concern.
In fact, sea lice present the “only hurdle” between Scotland and a sustainable salmon farming industry, he said.
Chile has even bigger problems, despite being the “ideal place” to farm salmon, he said. This is because of the Chilean industry’s “boom and bust history” that continues today, and which is the result of growing too quickly with inadequate regulations in its formative years, as well the country’s culture of “lacking a consensus approach” and being “much more free market.”
Shepherd highlighted that Chile produced 846,000 metric tons (MT) of salmon in 2015, but the algal bloom earlier this year resulted in the loss of more than 100,000 MT of salmon with a farm gate value of USD 800 million (EUR 716.9 million), “with the suspicion being that overstocking led to that.” At the same time, high levels of antibiotics are used, “unlike in Europe.”
Because biosecurity management is much more difficult with marine species in water than with terrestrial animals on land, salmon farming companies need to collaborate better together to deliver improved area and health management in order to reduce biosecurity risks, he offered.
Overall, the aquaculture industry loses USD 6 billion (EUR 5.4 billion) a year to such problems, which is a “phenomenal” amount but “probably also a gross underestimate,” which also underlined the need for such shared-approach management protocols, he said.
