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Salmon Farmers Are Scanning Fish Faces To Fight Killer Lice (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Millions of Atlantic salmon could have their faces stored in digital databases to track their health and single out those posing threats to their marine surroundings. And before you ask if fish have faces, they do: A company in Norway has developed a 3D scanner that can tell salmon apart based on the distinct pattern of spots around their eyes, mouth and gills. Fish-farming giant Cermaq Group AS wants to roll out the technology at salmon pens along Norway's fjord-etched coastline, betting it can prevent the spread of epidemics like sea lice that infect hundreds of millions of farmed fish and cost the global industry upwards of $1 billion each year.
Cargill wants to apply facial recognition to aqua farms, and Cermaq, operator of over 200 salmon and trout farms in Norway, Canada and Chile, is already doing tests on the iFarm design with its Norwegian technology partner BioSort AS. It'll look a lot like existing fish farms, with networks of 160-meter (525-foot) circular nets that are typically 35 meters deep and home to up to 200,000 salmon. The difference is that iFarms would be equipped with camera scanners at the water surface. On any given day, about 40,000 salmon in each pen will rise to above water for a gulp of air, something their bladders need to regulate buoyancy. Each time a salmon does this, typically every four days, it would go through a funnel fitted with sensors that would screen its face and body so records can be kept on each fish. If the machines pick up on abnormalities like lice or skin ulcers, the infected fish can be quarantined for medical treatment.
Cargill wants to apply facial recognition to aqua farms, and Cermaq, operator of over 200 salmon and trout farms in Norway, Canada and Chile, is already doing tests on the iFarm design with its Norwegian technology partner BioSort AS. It'll look a lot like existing fish farms, with networks of 160-meter (525-foot) circular nets that are typically 35 meters deep and home to up to 200,000 salmon. The difference is that iFarms would be equipped with camera scanners at the water surface. On any given day, about 40,000 salmon in each pen will rise to above water for a gulp of air, something their bladders need to regulate buoyancy. Each time a salmon does this, typically every four days, it would go through a funnel fitted with sensors that would screen its face and body so records can be kept on each fish. If the machines pick up on abnormalities like lice or skin ulcers, the infected fish can be quarantined for medical treatment.
about this article.
Ah, an item to add to the list of things that I'd just as soon not know existed ... "sea lice". (shudder)
Millions of Atlantic salmon could have their faces stored in digital databases to track their health and single out those posing threats to their marine surroundings.
That's what they say but this is obviously an anti-muslim fish ban. Or even worse some kind of fish-racism to keep the fish-line "pure". Where have I heard that before... snort.
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You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish.
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the infected fish can be quarantined for medical treatment.
Don't they mean 'disposed of' ?
Here comes PETA demanding Salmon rights.
Fish farming is not only more sustainable than hunting at sea, but in the long run tech like this makes farmed fish safer fish.
Face recognition?
They check for lice and if yes, they retrieve the fish.
But knowing it was Fishy McFishface27623 who had lice isn't useful as far as I can see from the article.
Sounds so nice and friendly and helpful! What utter liar wrote this? Of course, a salmon will just be killed if sick and disposed off.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But let's see how irrational you can be, in order to defend something you've been doing all your life, just because everybody else does it too.
Humans can't physically swim in the rivers where salmon live and catch them with their bare hands, and then eat their bodies while they are still alive, at least not without appearing to be a psychopath.
So if nobody else on Earth ate salmon, would you still think that you should eat it?
These "lice" are actually micro-organisms wild salmon doesn't care about, 'cause wild salmon has a strategy for dealing with them: living decades below 500 m for example.
That strikes me as awfully small, for an animal that is used to traveling thousands of miles.
It's basically as if you had to live your whole life in that Japanese apartment, except with a net instead of walls.
And both all your food and all your shit being dumped in that same large apartment building’s ventilation system and drinking water. (Which is slowly replaced, to be fair.)
I bet those salmon taste precisely like that. Like rot. With weak mushy high-fat low-protein bodies. And a massive accumulation of all the nasty heavy metals and chemicals and of course antibiotics and tranquilizers your can imagine.
No thanks.
I prefer a reduction and population balancing of the otherwise explosive planetary pathogen called humanity.
You see a salmon. They see a $100 bill. (Or something like that.)
Like with cattle and pigs, it will be pumped full of broad-spectrum antibiotics and pain killers and tranquilizers and whatnot ... the cheapest kind, of course.
Which you then get to eat too, when it is finally killed and disposed off into your mouth, in exchange for your wallet's contents.
And if it's too sick to be legally sold, it will be ground down, hopefully sterilized, dried, and dumped back in the farm, to "feed" the other salmon. (Remember where mad cow disease came from?)
Nothing goes to waste. Except every single cent you worked hard for. Hail the almighty profit growth!
In theory, maybe.
In reality, the entire food chain below farmed fisk is usually not farmed at all, but caught in the wild, taking the food of their wild cousins, and they die anyway.
Because some lifeform in that food chain is usually not farmable yet.
If the whole chain *and* the whole waste chain would be in a balanced closed loop, then yes, it would be sustainable. Otherwise, it's just a feel-good delusion that's even worse, just like having a false sense of security from bad/fake security solutions.
The question is, if the ecosystems will care if it's the thought that counts, if they are extinct before we actually get there.
"Hey Bob! There's a fish in pen six that has face lice! He's in there with 39,999 of his brothers and sisters. His face looks like this. Good luck!"
In the Faroe Islands, salmon farmers use fish lice eating fish, low tech, medicine free fish farming
And before you ask if fish have faces, they do:
If you've ever been to an authentic Chinese restaurant you'd already know this. Of course, most Americans think fish are only fillets or breaded sticks.
...the infected fish can be INCINERATED.
FTFY.
The Elephant in the Room is that we need to farm fish at all.
For all the crying and screaming about global warming, it isn't global warming that is going to kill us. What's going to kill us is that we are squeezing every last drop of natural resources from our planet just to keep 8 BILLION people alive, and the Earth just cannot handle that.
Global warming is just a red herring the elite have cooked up to keep everyone ignorant of the truth: that the Earth cannot sustain current population levels.
Nobody alive today wants to be the one to enforce a breeding ban, but it needs to happen. The world needs to be "one child per couple" for at least 3 or 4 generations to reduce populations to sustainable levels. two or three halvings of the population still leaves an overpopulated world, but it's a step in the right direction and would certainly leave the Earth with some room to breathe.
Reasonably conducted science concludes that the Earth can support a population of about 1 Billion people sustainably - and that means without the use of artificial techniques to increase the supply of food, water, and other natural resources. And, in my research, I would actually put that number quite a bit lower, perhaps 600-700 million people globally.
We need population control, not CO2 control, or CH4 control, or meat control, or forced veganism, or any of that mess. Just make fewer babies.
A few years ago, farmed salmon was about $5/lb, while wild-caught salmon was around $10/lb. Last year, the price of farmed salmon started rising precipitously. By the end of the year it was all the way up to $9/lb. I did a little research into why, and it's because of disease and parasite problems they're having in salmon farms killing off a lot of their fish.
The difference is a catfish or trout farm is entirely landlocked. They dig a bunch of trenches on land, fill them with water, and raise the fish in there. The waste products and any disease or parasitical infections are contained within the singular trench.
Salmon farms OTOH are mostly just nets in open water, typically at the mouths of fjords and rivers. The waste products (which include antibiotics) and any disease or parasitical infections are free to spread into the water and to other fish, including wild salmon going down the river to reach the ocean. Basically, salmon farms have externalized some of the clean-up costs associated with landlocked fish farming, by having their farms open to the water to wash the waste products out to sea. To the detriment of wild fish which happen to pass nearby.
Salmon is a fish I definitely recommend you buy wild-caught (preferably hook-and-line) rather than farmed. Especially now that the price of wild-caught is just a little bit more than farmed. Most wild salmon come from Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, which are both extremely well regulated. Or buy farmed rainbow trout/steelhead instead. It's the same thing. Rainbow trout were originally classified as trout based on geography. But in the 1980s DNA tests showed they were more closely related to the Pacific salmons. They were subsequently moved from the genus Salmo (which includes trout and Atlantic Salmon) to Oncorhynchus (the Pacific Salmons). So for North Americans, rainbow trout (a steelhead is an ocean-going rainbow trout) is more of a salmon than farmed Atlantic salmon, they just retain the trout name for historical reasons. And the orange/pink color of farmed salmon is artificial anyway. Wild salmon get the orange/pink color from the shrimp they eat, same as flamingos. Farmed salmon have the chemical added to their feed. It doesn't affect the flavor, so grey farmed trout is the same thing.
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Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Never mind scanning the fishes' faces, just burn the parasites off with a laser, as shown below.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/licehunting-underwater-drone-protects-salmon-with-lasers
A cylinder with a diameter of 160m and 35m depth for 200k salmon? If I could correctly, that leaves 80 liters of water per fish, and those are big fishes. It sounds insane.
Poor fishes. :(
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>I'm 4.5 years into a five-year contract and the five-year extension is on deck. As the recruiter told me when I accepted the job, government IT is a life long commitment.
If I was a recruiter who found some idiot who was willing to work for about half the prevailing wage I'd tell them shit to keep them at that job forever too. Do you know that if you make 50k that means they're paying the temp agency like 100k? They're "lowballing" one of your favorite words!!!
Most places would have been happy to pay you 70k and only keep 80k for themselves if you'd simply demanded it. Instead of arguing for a better quality of life you argue with people who actually enjoy fucking with you on the internet.
Your own worst enemy.