£1m plan to tackle complex gill disease in salmon
Norway has launched an initiative to discover more about the growing problem of complex gill disease in salmon.
FHF, the country’s aquaculture and fisheries fund has awarded NOK 15m (just over £1m) to look into preventive measures against the condition and to develop new tools to evaluate gill function at the edge of the cage.
The FHF said on its website that the challenges of complex gill disease have increased in recent years both in terms of frequency and geographical spread, but also in terms of complexity in causal relationships.
There are currently few tools available to tackle what FHF describes as a complex problem.
FHF said the objective will be achieved through three separate sub-objectives, each of which must be answered in separate projects.
These are to evaluate the effectiveness of methods and strategies used in the industry against complex gill disease; establish and validate new methods that can be used at the cage edge to evaluate the respiratory capacity of the gills and to test new measures can reduce the risk of gill disease and the development of severe gill inflammation.
The aim of the call for tenders is to generate knowledge about preventive and mitigating measures against the disease and to develop better tools to assess gill function.
