These Tiny Fish May Cure Salmon Farming's Environmental Problem [Norway]

Takepart
March 27, 2014

It may not look like anything important, but see that adorable little fish in the photo above? It’s a lumpsucker from Norway, and it may hold the answer to one of salmon farming’s most vexing problems: destructive sea lice and the chemicals commonly used to stop them.

Near the tiny island of Indre Kvaroy, just off the central coast of Norway, I recently visited the family-owned salmon farm Kvarøy Fiskeoppdrett, which has been using those sweet little lumpsuckers instead of chemicals or pesticides to keep their salmon pens free of sea lice—and so far, the results look promising.

If the term "lice," sea or not, has you crinkling your nose, you’d be justified. Sea lice are marine parasites that attach themselves to other host fish—in this case, salmon—typically feeding off the mucus and skin of the fish, and possibly lowering the salmon’s immune system, leaving it susceptible to other diseases. Environmentalists say it’s the transfer of sea lice from farmed salmon to wild salmon that can threaten the health of wild stocks.

The pesticide most commonly added to salmon feed to prevent sea lice is emamectin benzoate, more widely known by its brand name, SLICE. Once in the feed, the drug is absorbed into the salmon's tissue and transmitted to the sea lice, killing them off. But much in the way that superweeds have evolved over years of continuous pesticide use, or in the way antibiotic resistance is showing up in our food and health systems, sea lice are adapting as well.

“Everywhere it’s the same situation with sea lice,” says Thierry Chopin, professor of marine biology at the University of New Brunswick and scientific director of the Canadian Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture Network. “In Norway, Canada, Chile, and Scotland—everyone was using SLICE for 10 years. The sea lice are not stupid. They found a way to resistance, and now we are cornered.”

Read the full article in Takepart.