Here is some remarkably frightening stuff, in an article in NOLA.com on demands for aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico:

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What effect locally farmed fish would have on the New Orleans area's discriminating seafood palate is a matter of opinion.

Longtime seafood dealers such as Cliff Hall of the New Orleans Fish House have grappled with declining Gulf catches for years. Diners in the restaurants to which he sells demand certain fish, whether the weather cooperates or not. Often if swordfish or yellowfin tuna is getting short, he'll have to fly in fish from South America to fill orders.

"Sometimes we'll get lead time. Sometimes they'll call that morning," Hall said. "We're lunatics around here. There's no other city where you could order the same day and get that product on the same day. It's a lot of pressure to pull that off, but you know, we've got to do it."

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No, I don't know: Why have they "got to do it"?  Are family members of theirs being held hostage?

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

Sea lice are not insects, but rather copepod crustaceans.  Copepods are a diverse group, which by some estimations account for a greater proportion of biomass in the oceans than any other taxon.

This is from the Wikipedia article on "sea louse":

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Sea lice are also economically damaging to the fish farms themselves; in one recent year, sea lice cost salmon farmers more than US$100 million for treatment and lost production, which represents about 20% of their total costs.

Currently, fish farmers rely heavily on the chemical emamectin benzoate (SLICE) for controlling sea louse infestation rates. Many governments now impose limits on sea louse infestation levels on fish farms. The adequacy of existing regulations, and the environmental impacts of the use of SLICE are highly controversial. Public opinion is particularly polarized in the northeast Pacific where a moratorium on expansion has been lifted by the British Columbia government while the Alaska government is maintaining a total ban on salmon farming in its waters.

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Once again, we see that we would be wrong to extend our general admiration for our often enlightened Canadian neighbors to the way they manage their extraction industries.  Or rather, fail to manage them.

It should be recognized that aquaculture, as it is currently practised, is a serious matter of concern not only to conservationists, e.g. those worried about the health of populations of wild salmon, but also to promoters of animal welfare.

Fish are sensitive vertebrates.  The manner of their sensitivity and perceptivity is superficially different from our own, and so we do not always recognize that they are as capable of suffering as terrestrial vertebrates, with whose experiences we can more readily sympathize.

Apparently, fish farms are just another kind of concentrated animal feeding operation.  Just as we protest the inhumane confinement of, say, cattle and chickens in factory farms, so we should understand that the confinement of such wild fish as salmon is if anything even more inhumane.

Not surprisingly, one aspect of their confinement is their inevitable exposure to dangerous opportunistic organisms, such as the parasitic sea lice.  In CAFOs on land, the "solution," highly problematic and controversial, is to supplement the animals' diet with antibiotics.  It seems that fish farmers as well are just as short-sightedly thinking along those lines.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

I know just how those female swordtail fish feel.  Whenever I notice not far off a large, long-tailed, strikingly colored male, it is amazing how all those inhibition-genes just start clicking off, one after another.

The workers' suggestion that an analogous genetic expression, as part of the behavioral process associated with feeling sexual attraction, is common to all vertebrates, sounds like a very plausible hypothesis.

But I wonder how they conduct the experiment.  How do they extract the RNA from the fish, in so unintrusive and carefully timed a manner, that they can relate what the RNA looks like to what the fish were perceiving and feeling at that moment?

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.