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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.
The salmon louse is a crustacean, a member of the phylum Arthropoda. Jellyfish are members of the phylum Cnidaria.
Fish farming is not only more sustainable than hunting at sea, but in the long run tech like this makes farmed fish safer fish.
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.
You took him to school. No, that's a terrible pun, I cod do better. Gimme a minute to mullet over.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.