Is it true that aquaculture uses lots of antibiotics?
No. Absolutely not. When fish mariculture began in the late 1960s, there were no commercially available vaccines to deal with pathogens. At that time antibiotics and therapeutants were occasionally used to treat fish with an illness. In acute illness, like vibriosis, the medication was often applied too late, fish were not feeding well in later stages of the illness and heavy losses sometime occurred. But over the years, vaccines have been developed to treat the fish before stocking in the cages. In many cases, the fish are merely immersed in a vaccine mixture and the fish takes up the antigen through the gills and forms their own antibodies. Unlike cattle, fish growth rate declines with use of antibiotics, so there is no incentive to treat with expensive antibiotics. In the past two decades, effective vaccines have reduced the use of antibiotics exponentially. Exact figures are not available worldwide, but some sources suggest the reduction has been nearly 99%! In the U.S. the annual
