The outlay required to comply with statutory limits for salmon lice is considerable.

Lice get big billing on the Beeb

Lice problems in the Scottish salmon industry were the subject of an extensive report published on BBC Scotland's website today. 

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Marine Harvest (MH), the largest producer of Scottish salmon, told the broadcaster that it is losing around 1,500 tonnes of fish per year due to lice. And the report highlighted published figures from MH that show that Scotland has a far higher incidence of parasite problems than Norway and Ireland.

According to the BBC, a survey published last year revealed that the share of affected sites in Scotland went from 28% in 2014 to 49% in 2015; while the Norwegian level remained at 5% and in Ireland it rose from 8% to 18%.

Meanwhile, the problems increased in 2016 – in an interview with BBC Scotland, Steve Bracken, Marine Harvest’s business support manager, said: "We've had a mortality problem here in 2016 which, for us, is not acceptable. We reckon lice and associated poor growth could be in the region of 1,500 tonnes of fish that we've lost because of sea lice."

He also spoke about an incident on Skye last summer when a Thermolicer treatment lead to nearly 100,000 mortalities and the need to dump 460 tonnes of waste fish.

"The welfare of the fish we have in our care is our top priority, so It was extremely regrettable," he said. "The fish had been previously compromised with amoebic gill disease, so they were already weak."