Assessing genotype-environment interactions in Atlantic salmon reared in freshwater loch and recirculating systems.

The interest in recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) is growing due to their benefits such as increased productivity, better control over animal care, reduced environmental effects, and less water consumption. However, in some regions of the world, traditional aquaculture methods remain prevalent, and selective breeding has often been designed for performance within these systems. Therefore, it is important to evaluate how current fish populations fare in RAS to guide future breeding choices.

Validating statistical properties of resilience indicators derived from simulated longitudinal performance measures of farmed animals.

Resilience is commonly defined as the ability of an individual to be minimally affected or to quickly recover from a challenge. Improvement of animals' resilience is a vital component of sustainable livestock production but has so far been hampered by the lack of established quantitative resilience measures. Several studies proposed that summary statistics of the deviations of an animal's observed performance from its target performance trajectory (i.

Applying genetic technologies to combat infectious diseases in aquaculture.

Disease and parasitism cause major welfare, environmental and economic concerns for global aquaculture. In this review, we examine the status and potential of technologies that exploit genetic variation in host resistance to tackle this problem. We argue that there is an urgent need to improve understanding of the genetic mechanisms involved, leading to the development of tools that can be applied to boost host resistance and reduce the disease burden.

Using in-abattoir 3-dimensional measurements from images of beef carcasses for the prediction of EUROP classification grade and carcass weight.

Imaging technology can aid the automatic extraction of measurements from beef carcasses, which can be used for objective grading. Many abattoirs, however, rely on manual grading due to the required infrastructure and cost, making technology unfeasible. This study explores 3-dimensional (3D) imaging technology, requiring limited infrastructure, and its ability to predict carcass weight, conformation class and fat class for non-invasive, objective classification.

Animal board invited review: Quantification of resilience in farm animals.

Resilience, when defined as the capacity of an animal to respond to short-term environmental challenges and to return to the prechallenge status, is a dynamic and complex trait. Resilient animals can reinforce the capacity of the herd to cope with often fluctuating and unpredictable environmental conditions. The ability of modern technologies to simultaneously record multiple performance measures of individual animals over time is a huge step forward to evaluate the resilience of farm animals.