Currently, extensive information is collected by the Canadian federal government about fish that die on BC salmon farms (~10% of farmed salmon over the course of a year). In contrast, little information is publicly available about disease among fish that do not die on the farms (~90% of farmed salmon over the course of a year). The overall objective of our study is to determine if surveillance programs focusing on moribund and dead farmed fish are missing data important to wild salmon health by not sampling farm fish that are not moribund or dead.
From 2013 to 2015, as part of the Strategic Salmon Health Initiative (SSHI), Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) co-sponsored a detailed study of disease on four BC Atlantic salmon farms that involved regular sampling of live, moribund, and recently deceased fish. Some histopathology from one of these farms has been published (Di Cicco et al. 2017), and the SSHI team is preparing additional publications reporting specific findings from this work, but histopathology of large numbers of fish from the other three farms is not planned, outside of our proposed study.
