Selective breeding programs for tilapia are increasingly incorporating welfare-relevant traits including stress tolerance, disease resistance, and behavioral indicators alongside production performance.
The integration of welfare traits into tilapia selective breeding programs represents a significant opportunity to improve the lives of billions of farmed fish. Genetic selection for reduced stress reactivity would decrease the welfare cost of routine management procedures including grading, transport, and water quality fluctuations. Disease-resistant lines reduce the incidence of infections that cause prolonged suffering and mass mortality events. Selecting for reduced aggression could decrease injury rates without requiring environmental modifications. The challenge is developing validated welfare phenotyping methods that can be applied at the scale required for genetic selection programs.