I am a researcher at New York University's WATR-lab, where I study fish behavior and welfare. My work focuses on species-specific welfare impacts in aquaculture and the behavioral complexity of fishes in both captive and wild environments. I am also a research associate at the Welfare Footprint Institute.
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Thanks for linking to your post! I rely solely on FAO-reported tonnage here and assume market-size animals destined for human consumption when converting live weights to individual counts. Feed fish are a structurally distinct welfare context I don't really account for here, and probably needs a different intervention approach altogether.
Hi Hazo, yes I completely agree with you about overstating the homogeneity of chickens! The broiler/layer distinction is a problem, but most advocates intuitively understand this only for terrestrial systems. My analysis only segments aquaculture by species and country. I don't break down by production system, life stage, or procedure, all of which I think create additional target populations within a single species. Atlantic salmon farmed in RAS vs marine cages alone should be considered completely different target populations.
Thank you for reading!
I'm less familiar with insect farming, but these recommendations are likely useful to consider in any industry that's highly experimental, rapidly evolving, or hyper-localized. With insects, I think preventative approaches are probably more tractable than direct intervention approaches because we have such limited welfare knowledge about them.