Prevention beats cure for lice
One of the world’s most eminent sea louse specialists believes that the salmon industry is spending too much time “firefighting” sea louse problems, when they should in fact be looking at ways of preventing their impact.
“We operate too much firefighting the problems regarding sea lice. We have much more work to do when it comes to ?prevention,” said Kjell Maroni from FHF (Fisheries - and Aquaculture Industry Research Fund) at today’s Sintef/FHF seminar in Trondheim.
The theme for the conference was lice and delousing tools.
Maroni began by saying that he is surprised that there is no more reliable data available on what happens before, during and after delousing and he went on to emphasise the importance of sharing data.
“The industry has a good track record of solving problems by sharing experiences. The industry has a lot of knowledge about lice. If we divide it even better, we can get far wider scope [of research and data],” he said.
Maroni added that he thinks delousing operations should be strictly unnecessary.
“A panel in FHF has just had a meeting where we concluded that, while treatments will continue to be an important tool, we must shift the focus towards prevention, as there is already much going on,” he said.
Key to this, he argued, was concentrating more on elements such as breeding, site placement, feed and other measures in order to prevent lice-related problems occuring.
