Fish Farm Inspections and Sampling Procedures: The Mediterranean Point of View

Marine Mediterranean aquaculture meant as intesive rearing system for zootechnical production has known a recent development extremely fast. The development of efficacious breeding protocols, the availability of artificial feeding more and more efficient and some principles adopted in facing diseases have lead the growth of an industrial rearing system.

If we consider the health management approach within the context of this this complex productive scenario there is the need to discriminate between, at least, two main different groups of farms that are extremely different and caracterised by peculiar health/disease management issues. First of all there are to be considered the hatcheries, this kind of farm are caracterised by having an extremely high level of technology and control of the water that; in these system biosecurity measures are generally high and the water quality parameters are kept monitored constantly.

Secondly there are to be considered all the farms that undergo to the category of “ongrowing”. These kind of rearing activities, once obtained the seed / juveniles provide them feeding till the juveniles have reached the market size. Within this group sea cages have affirmed as the best ones both for economical and technological/environmental aspects.

Sanitary issues to be managed, their evolution, related control strategies and analytical tools are, in this complex, quite different but all are linked to a common data: they are part of a framework that need to be considered firstly. In this presentation, mainly based on pictures, different aspects of clinical inspection/sampling protocols are described.