Biological control approaches using probiotics and bacteriophages for shrimp disease management reduce antibiotic dependence while improving individual shrimp welfare through disease burden reduction.
Disease in farmed shrimp causes welfare harms at massive scale — mortality events affecting millions of animals simultaneously, each experiencing physiological distress from viral or bacterial sepsis. Biocontrol approaches that reduce disease incidence are thus welfare interventions as much as production interventions. The shift from antibiotic dependency to probiotic and phage-based approaches serves both welfare objectives — reducing individual disease burden — and environmental welfare objectives by protecting wild crustacean populations from antibiotic runoff. Welfare-motivated disease management in shrimp aligns with production efficiency, providing economic incentives for adoption of more welfare-positive approaches.