Robust Salmon

A robust salmon is a fish that performs well throughout the production cycle. Robustness includes traits such as survival, resilience to environmental challenges, disease resistance, welfare, and consistent growth under challenging commercial farming conditions.

Genetics plays a critical role in improving fish robustness, survival, welfare, growth, and disease resistance. By selecting the best breeding candidates as the parents of the products, Benchmark Genetics enables producers to reduce biological risk and improve production efficiency to support a more sustainable aquaculture.

Candidates are selected using decades of performance data, advanced genomic tools, and phenotypic measurements. This enables breeders to identify elite male and female fish with the most desirable characteristics and combine them to produce high-performing offspring.

Cryopreservation enables breeders to preserve milt from elite male fish and use it strategically in both breeding programmes and commercial ova production. By providing greater flexibility in mating decisions and long-term genetic resource management, this technology helps safeguard valuable genetic traits and ensures their effective use in future generations. It also supports the precise selection and combination of desirable traits, contributing to the production of high-performance commercial ova.

The objective of the breeding nucleus is to maintain genetic diversity within the population while achieving balanced genetic progress across all traits that are important to the salmon farming industry, both now and in the long-term. This ensures both short- and long-term improvement and sustainability of the breeding programme.

In contrast, the broodstock used to produce commercial salmon egg products are selected more intensively for traits that are of highest priority to the industry now and where genetics can deliver the greatest impact. Traits of current high priority include growth performance, product quality, and disease resistance, with particular emphasis on resistance to IPN and CMS.

Yes. Selective breeding has already improved resistance to important diseases such as IPN and CMS. Ongoing research continues to understand the genetics underlying improved health and resilience.

Yes, research by Benchmark Genetics and collaborators suggests that it can. By combining genomic selection, targeted phenotyping, and field-performance testing, Benchmark Genetics’ breeding programmes are selecting for reduced susceptibility to Complex Gill Disease (CGD) to support better fish welfare and survival.

Yes. Benchmark Genetics’ study showed that survival during a natural CMS outbreak was 14 % higher in highly selected families compared to average after just one generation of genomic selection.