Salmon lice, Lepeophtheirus salmonis, are naturally occurring parasites of salmon in sea water. Intensive salmon farming provides better conditions for parasite growth and transmission compared with natural conditions, creating problems for both the salmon farming industry and, under certain conditions, wild salmonids. Salmon lice originating from farms negatively impact wild stocks of salmonids, although the extent of the impact is a matter of debate. Estimates from Ireland and Norway indicate an odds ratio of 1.1:1-1.2:1 for sea lice treated Atlantic salmon smolt to survive sea migration compared to untreated smolts. This is considered to have a moderate population regulatory effect. The development of resistance against drugs most commonly used to treat salmon lice is a serious concern for both wild and farmed fish. Several large initiatives have been taken to encourage the development of new strategies, such as vaccines and novel drugs, for the treatment or removal of salmon lice from farmed fish. The newly sequenced salmon louse genome will be an important tool in this work. The use of cleaner fish has emerged as a robust method for controlling salmon lice, and aquaculture production of wrasse is important towards this aim. Salmon lice have large economic consequences for the salmon industry, both as direct costs for the prevention and treatment, but also indirectly through negative public opinion.

Tight coupling to ecosystems and dependence on common-pool resources threaten fisheries and aquaculture.

We designed an experimental market with posted prices to investigate consumers' willingness to pay for the color of salmon. Salmon fillets varying in color and price were displayed in 20 choice scenarios. In each scenario, the participants chose which of two salmon fillets they wanted to buy. To induce real economic incentives, each participant drew one unique binding scenario; the participants then had to buy the salmon fillet they had chosen in their binding scenario.Key words: choice experiment, color, mixed logit, salmon, willingness to pay.During the last decade, economists have used experimental markets to investigate consumer preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for food quality attributes. The most popular method has been the second-price sealed-bid (Vickrey) auction where the participants submit sealed bids for the product and the price is determined by the secondhighest bid (Vickery, Shogren et al., Alfnes and Rickertsen). The Vickrey auction is an incentive compatible method for eliciting WTP; however, it is an unfamiliar market mechanism for most consumers. Consumers are more familiar with markets where the seller posts the prices and they, as consumers, have to choose which products to buy. 3Lusk and Schroeder designed an experimental market with posted prices to investigate consumers' WTP for food quality attributes. They had five types of beef, and ask the participants to choose which of the five types they would prefer to buy in 17 pricing scenarios. To induce real economic incentives, one of the price scenarios was randomly drawn as binding. The participants had to buy the type of beef they had chosen in the binding scenario and pay the respective price posted in that scenario. The choice task in such an experiment is relatively close to the choice tasks consumers face in grocery stores every day. Furthermore, it is in the participants' own interest to choose the alternative they prefer in each scenario, and their incentives to reveal true preferences is relatively transparent. We will refer to such non-hypothetical choice experiment with posted prices as real choice (RC) experiments.We have conducted a RC experiment to investigate consumers' WTP for salmon with various degrees of flesh redness, and to investigate whether information on the origin of the color influence consumers' WTP. Salmon are recognized for their pink-red flesh color, which distinguishes them from other species. Consumers use intrinsic cues such as color to infer the quality of food products. In surveys as well as focus groups, consumers have stated that they see the color of salmon as an indicator of flavor and freshness, and it has been shown that redness contributes significantly to the overall enjoyment of cooked salmon (Anderson, Sylvia et al.).Consumers' WTP for the color of farmed salmon is interesting for at least two reasons. While wild salmon get their characteristic red color from the crustances they eat in the sea. Farmed salmon get the color from synthetically produced feed additives. 4However, the f...

World food prices hit an all-time high in February 2011 and are still almost two and a half times those of 2000. Although three billion people worldwide use seafood as a key source of animal protein, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations–which compiles prices for other major food categories–has not tracked seafood prices. We fill this gap by developing an index of global seafood prices that can help to understand food crises and may assist in averting them. The fish price index (FPI) relies on trade statistics because seafood is heavily traded internationally, exposing non-traded seafood to price competition from imports and exports. Easily updated trade data can thus proxy for domestic seafood prices that are difficult to observe in many regions and costly to update with global coverage. Calculations of the extent of price competition in different countries support the plausibility of reliance on trade data. Overall, the FPI shows less volatility and fewer price spikes than other food price indices including oils, cereals, and dairy. The FPI generally reflects seafood scarcity, but it can also be separated into indices by production technology, fish species, or region. Splitting FPI into capture fisheries and aquaculture suggests increased scarcity of capture fishery resources in recent years, but also growth in aquaculture that is keeping pace with demand. Regionally, seafood price volatility varies, and some prices are negatively correlated. These patterns hint that regional supply shocks are consequential for seafood prices in spite of the high degree of seafood tradability.

Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable and flexible tool for assessing performance in individual fisheries, and for establishing cross-sectional links between enabling conditions, management strategies and triple bottom line outcomes. Conceptually separating measures of performance, the FPIs use 68 individual outcome metrics—coded on a 1 to 5 scale based on expert assessment to facilitate application to data poor fisheries and sectors—that can be partitioned into sector-based or triple-bottom-line sustainability-based interpretative indicators. Variation among outcomes is explained with 54 similarly structured metrics of inputs, management approaches and enabling conditions. Using 61 initial fishery case studies drawn from industrial and developing countries around the world, we demonstrate the inferential importance of tracking economic and community outcomes, in addition to resource status.