title: Factors affecting variation in mortality of marine Atlantic salmon Salmo salar in Scotland.
abstract: Databases of site production have an important role to play in the investigation and understanding of diseases, since they store valuable amounts of disease and management data. Diseases pose an important constraint to economic expansion of aquaculture. They are dependent on the complex interacting factors of pathogen, environment, and host, and the causes of death can be related to nutritional, environmental, and genetic factors of the host or infectious agents. We examined the drivers of mortality from a single site-production database, which represented one-third of Scottish farmed salmon Salmo salar L. production in 2005, to determine whether mortality 'benchmarking' data could be generalised across sites and production cycles. We show that farm mortality records play an important role in studying mortality losses and identifying of management problems in production. We found that mortalities varied across the months of the year and with the time of year of initial stocking. Production cycles that started in the third quarter of the year had the highest mortality overall. Furthermore, we found site-to-site variation in mortality that may have been caused by either random occurrence of epidemics and environmental events or other local effects.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Aquaculture, School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK.
authors.forename: Silvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Soares
authors.forename: Alexander G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Murray
authors.forename: Mags
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Crumlish
authors.forename: James F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Turnbull
authors.forename: Darren M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Green
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D018175:Birnaviridae Infections / Q000401:mortality / Q000662:veterinary; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005393:Fish Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000401:mortality* / Q000821:virology; D018061:Infectious pancreatic necrosis virus; D008136:Longevity; D008954:Models, Biological; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D011157:Population Dynamics; D012307:Risk Factors; D020317:Salmo salar; D012606:Scotland; D012621:Seasons; D013696:Temperature; D013997:Time Factors