Prof. Karin Pittman, Department of Biological Sciences, UiB

After 50 years of intensive aquaculture we know the fish as an animal better than we ever did from millenia of fishing. Salmon, and other fish, are definitely not chickens, but treating them as "chicken of the sea" has led us down a deadend where mortalities are high and solutions hard to find.The fundamental difference between industrial agriculture and industrial aquaculture is that with fish we do not know when the stock is healthy. The absence of reportable diseases is not the same as the presence of health. I focus on the cellular composition of developing tissues in developing fish, both normal and abnormal, laying the foundation for international halibut farming among other aspects of longterm health. Applying a novel technique to the slimy barriers (skin, gills and guts) we have been able to give reference intervals for mucosal homeostasis of these tissues for salmon and about 12 other fish species to help build universally applicable health standards for farmed fish. For this, we need to look at how barriers, evolution and management have co-created the current difficult situation for fish farming and the solutions available.

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