Pablo Sar
PhD Student @ Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
I work on applied ethics, AI ethics, animal ethics, and the moral consideration of artificial and non-human minds. My background is in Philosophy and History, and I hold an MSt in Practical Ethics from the University of Oxford.
This is a really good suggestion. One of the things that makes this question attractive is precisely that it may not require a standalone research programme: parasite counts could potentially be added at relatively low marginal cost to existing longitudinal work on wild fish.
That kind of design would also address one of the main gaps I was trying to highlight in the post. Rather than just measuring prevalence at a single point in time, it could tell us whether the number of parasites present is associated with differences in feeding, growth, behaviour, or escape performance over time.
It would be very useful to identify groups already doing mark–recapture work where this could be incorporated. Thanks for pointing this out!