A Modelling Framework for Assessing the Risk of Emerging Diseases Associated with the Use of Cleaner Fish to Control Parasitic Sea Lice on Salmon Farms.

Sea lice are the most damaging parasite of marine salmonids, both economically and in terms of potential impacts on wild fish. An increasingly widely applied control is the use of cleaner fish (CF) such as wrasse that eat lice. However, such CF can carry pathogens that may cause disease in salmon, including the potential emergence of new diseases. This is not just a theoretical risk, as demonstrated by a recent outbreak of viral haemorrhagic septicaemia in wrasse held on salmon farms in Shetland. A modelling framework is developed to identify conditions in which emergence might occur, and, from this, means of reducing risk. Diseases that might emerge easily in farmed salmon would be likely to have already done so by other routes of exposure, and if risks are very low, they would need to be greatly enhanced to become significant relative to costs of lice control. CF may most enhance risks from disease with moderate probability of emerging. Risks of emergence can be reduced by replacing wild-caught with hatchery-reared CF, minimizing mixing of CF from different sources, surveillance for clinical disease in the CF and ensuring strategic biosecurity (area management with synchronized fallowing). Reuse of CF for a second salmon production cycle may reduce costs and even probability of infection (especially from wild-caught CF), but should only be considered as part of a rigorous area management programme because the practice presents opportunities for pathogens to adapt to salmon by weakening fallowing.