The latest approaches to controlling sea lice in farmed salmon while minimizing chemical treatments and welfare harms.
Sea lice management represents one of the most complex welfare challenges in salmon aquaculture. The lice themselves cause tissue damage, impaired osmoregulation, and behavioral changes consistent with pain. But treatment methods also cause welfare harms - thermal treatments at high temperatures cause stress and sometimes mortality, and bath chemicals can cause gill irritation. Cleaner fish used as biological control often have poor welfare outcomes in salmon farms, with high mortality and inadequate refuges. Integrated management that minimizes all welfare harms is the ideal but rarely fully achieved in commercial practice.