Aquaculture adopts integrated pest management techniques for water-borne pests.
Like their land-based colleagues, fish farmers have to deal with pests and parasites that attack their animals. And like famers on land, they are looking for natural ways to deal with the pests that minimize the use of chemical treatments.
For salmon farms on the east coast of Canada, that means finding a way to fight the sea lice that can plague their open-water net pens. The aquaculture industry is now experimenting with using “cleaner fish,” such as cunner fish and lumpfish, to help control lice numbers, similar to how land-based integrated pest management techniques use natural predators to control pests. Read more in Hakai.