Aquatic Animals' Welfare: Current Issues in Fishery and Aquaculture

Aquatic animals are animals that live partially or totally in freshwater or saltwater habitats. Bearing this in mind, the aquatic animal sectors can include farmed and captured animals for food or recreation, and ornamental animals. In recent years there has been a growing demand for aquatic species as a food source for human nutrition. However, this demand has placed increased global fishing pressures on wild animals and intensified aquaculture production resulting in animal welfare concerns for these species. Therefore, aquatic animal welfare is an emerging issue from the “capture to fork” food chain that includes ethical concerns, the impacts of stress on animals’ health and product quality, as well as increasing production costs.
Better animal welfare can be achieved through scientific knowledge and protocols to ensure aquatic animals' health, reproduction, and longevity. However, such improvements are often associated with higher costs that can reduce the competitiveness of production. In addition, despite researchers having demonstrated that several aquatic animals have different behavioural, cognitive, and affective abilities, there are numerous gaps in this growing body of knowledge. The lack of information is mainly due to the absence of specific literature describing protocols to determine how to improve aquatic animal welfare based on to each species’ needs. Therefore, more evidence is required to correlate the different performance indicators with viability, sustainability, and animal welfare status. Research into the influence of aquatic animal’s welfare state also needs to be explored further. We invite authors that can contribute with research outputs that provide a better understanding of species-specific knowledge concerning aquatic animals’ welfare and its application in fishery and aquaculture production.
Contributions can explore, but are not limited to, theory and practices areas from different aquatic animal species that include:
• Capture, transport, and husbandry recommendations.
• Protocols to assess and/or ensure good welfare, behavioural and physiological needs, environmental requirements, slaughter methods and food product quality.
• Ethical, economic, and political dimensions in this field.

Keywords: Fish welfare, animal behaviour, fishery, aquaculture, fish quality

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.