Little love lost over lumpfish

LOCH Duart ‘dabbled’ in lumpfish a few years ago, taking eggs from Iceland and growing them in its own facility. The fish were used in various stocking densities on a couple of sites.

‘But despite all of the great results we were hearing from others, we couldn’t replicate them on our own sites,’ said Lewis Bennett.

They decided that the lumpfish presented too many welfare and health challenges, high summer mortality, and only worked during the winter. Wrasse, on the other hand, seemed to have fewer health challenges.

All this, combined with limited lice control, brought an end to the use of lumpfish at Loch Duart sites.

Operations director Mark Warrington said: ‘If you’ve got ballan and lumpfish mixed in I think people will find that it’s actually the ballan doing the trick.

‘People will say how the lumpfish are, and then you find it’s the one per cent ballan in with them that are getting the results.’

To change his mind, ‘someone would need to take me to a lice free site, where that result has been achieved solely by using 100 per cent lumpfish, but without the need to top up several times due to mortalities’, he said.

Bennett thinks there is an industry trend away from lumpfish, with wrasse increasingly favoured both here and in southern Norway.

‘The site managers like the wrasse. People on the farm see what’s working and that drives everyone,’ he said, while acknowledging that lumpfish production is far more reliable and supplies much more readily available.