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Diseases of Aquatic Organisms

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DAO 103:101-109 (2013)  -  DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/dao02562

Factors affecting variation in mortality of marine Atlantic salmon Salmo salar in Scotland

Silvia Soares1,*, Alexander G. Murray2, Mags Crumlish1, James F. Turnbull1, Darren M. Green1

1Institute of Aquaculture, School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK
2Marine Scotland Science, Marine Laboratory, Victoria Road, PO Box 101, Aberdeen AB11 9DB, UK

ABSTRACT: Databases of site production have an important role to play in the investigation and understanding of diseases, since they store valuable amounts of disease and management data. Diseases pose an important constraint to economic expansion of aquaculture. They are dependent on the complex interacting factors of pathogen, environment, and host, and the causes of death can be related to nutritional, environmental, and genetic factors of the host or infectious agents. We examined the drivers of mortality from a single site-production database, which represented one-third of Scottish farmed salmon Salmo salar L. production in 2005, to determine whether mortality ‘benchmarking’ data could be generalised across sites and production cycles. We show that farm mortality records play an important role in studying mortality losses and identifying of management problems in production. We found that mortalities varied across the months of the year and with the time of year of initial stocking. Production cycles that started in the third quarter of the year had the highest mortality overall. Furthermore, we found site-to-site variation in mortality that may have been caused by either random occurrence of epidemics and environmental events or other local effects.


KEY WORDS: Mortality · Disease · Database · Aquaculture


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Cite this article as: Soares S, Murray AG, Crumlish M, Turnbull JF, Green DM (2013) Factors affecting variation in mortality of marine Atlantic salmon Salmo salar in Scotland. Dis Aquat Org 103:101-109. https://doi.org/10.3354/dao02562

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