About this Research Topic

Background

The aquaculture industry is continuously growing over the years. Thus, addressing welfare issues of fish and other aquatic animal species around the world becomes more essential every day. It is crucial to base efforts to improve the welfare of these animals on scientific knowledge. In line with this, we hope that a curatorship of relevant current publications in this field will help to raise the importance of animal welfare in the further development of fish farming as a food production system. This approach may also reduce the risk of making the same mistakes in the development of aquaculture systems as made in terrestrial animal farming models. Hence, the objective of this Research Topic is to promote animal welfare science applied to aquatic animal life under farming conditions as an important tool to develop sustainable aquaculture systems. In this regard, we will consider wild and farmed animals, as well as the people and the environmental issues involved, thus promoting social responsibility while also showing that the consideration of the welfare of aquatic animals can also give benefits for the producers, consumers and other possible stakeholders.

Potential topics to be covered include, but are not limited to:
- Animal welfare science applied to aquatic systems in developing supply chains
- On-farm, transport and slaughter standards and practices related to aquatic
animal welfare and their implementation in farming conditions
- Operational welfare indicators (OWIs) applied to aquaculture systems
- Preferences and motivations of aquatic animals applied to their welfare in
production systems
- Different strategies for environmental enrichment as a tool to improve animal
welfare in aquatic production systems
- Technological solutions and modern welfare indicators applied to aquatic animal species under farming conditions
- Producer, consumer and citizen perceptions towards the welfare of aquatic
farmed animal species
- Economical and environmental benefits of improved welfare of the farmed
aquatic animal species
- Understanding the bottlenecks for the aquaculture production chain to
incorporate the welfare principles for aquatic animals
- Consequences of increasingly intensified aquaculture production systems to the welfare of aquatic animals
- Alternative protein production systems and their relation to aquatic animal
welfare issues

Keywords: alternative protein production, aquaculture, production chain, animal welfare indicators, environment enrichment

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.

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