Why Aquaculture Matters, The Biological Threats It Faces, And Where The Technology Opportunity Sits

Wild fish stocks have essentially flatlined since the late 1980s, hovering between 86 and 94 million tonnes per year (FAO, State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, 2024), while the human population continues to climb toward 9.7 billion by 2050 and per capita fish consumption has more than doubled since 1961, from 9.1 kg to 20.7 kg per year (FAO, SOFIA 2024). Aquatic foods now provide 15% of all animal protein consumed globally and for 3.2 billion people, they supply at least 20% of their animal protein from all sources (FAO, SOFIA 2024). Fish is a cornerstone of global food security, particularly in developing nations.

Aquaculture has stepped in to fill the gap that wild catch simply cannot close. Indeed, in 2022, farmed fish production surpassed wild catch for the first time in history, 94.4 million tonnes from aquaculture versus 91 million from capture fisheries, a total production value of $313 billion (FAO, SOFIA 2024). By 2032, aquatic animal production is projected to reach 205 million tonnes, with aquaculture driving the vast majority of that growth (FAO, SOFIA 2024).

The world will need more farmed fish, significantly more, and the trajectory is only going in one direction. But there is a growing and increasingly expensive problem beneath the surface.

A Rising Tide of Biological Threats

Aquaculture faces an escalating set of biological risks intertwined with a changing climate that acts as the common catalyst across all of them. Warmer waters, shifting ocean chemistry and more frequent extreme weather events are creating ideal conditions for pathogens, parasites and other biological stressors to thrive. Disease outbreaks have been estimated to cause around 15% of total fish production losses in major producing nations (Assefa & Abunna, 2018; Frontiers in Aquaculture, 2025), with global economic impacts running into the tens of billions of dollars annually.

We see four main categories of biological threat face the industry.

Sea Lice

Sea lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) are the single largest parasitic threat to salmon farming. These tiny crustaceans attach to fish, feed on their skin and mucus, and create open wounds that leave fish vulnerable to secondary infections. They are also a regional problem, because lice transfer easily between neighbouring farms and from farms to wild salmon, meaning one operator's inaction raises the risk for everyone.

The scale of the challenge in Norway, the global leader in aquaculture, is significant. According to the 2025 Fish Health Report, the industry hit a record 3,918 treatment weeks, driven by high sea temperatures accelerating parasite growth (Norway Fish Health Report, 2025). 81% of fish health personnel reported higher treatment needs in their regions, and in August alone 47 farms exceeded lice thresholds, doubling from just two weeks prior (Norway Fish Health Report, 2025).

Handling related injuries from intensive delousing were the top cause of mortality and poor welfare, and total reported mortality in sea cages was 54.9 million fish (Norway Fish Health Report, 2025; IntraFish, 2025). Manolin's analysis of the season revealed an uncomfortable dynamic, with salmon prices falling at the same time as lice pressure hit unprecedented levels, farms fragmented their treatments to cut costs, switching from synchronised delousings to shorter, smaller interventions (Manolin, "Norway's Familiar Sea Lice Data Pattern," 2025).

As Tony Chen described it, each farm's decision to delay looks rational in isolation, but across a region it allows lice levels to climb and even best practice operators suffer reinfestation. The impact on wild salmon smolts from farm origin lice remained as high as 2024 (Norway Fish Health Report, 2025), and Norway's traffic light system, which constrains production growth based on wild salmon impact, showed production areas 2 through 10 with high lice exposure heading into 2026 (Manolin, "The Signals That Will Shape Aquaculture in 2026," Jan 2026).

Jellyfish

Jellyfish blooms are an increasingly serious and unpredictable threat to open net aquaculture. Jellyfish can kill fish in several ways, stinging and damaging gills, clogging nets and water intake systems and competing for food in the water column. Even micro jellyfish (hydrozoans) as small as 2mm can be lethal, blocking and stinging gills and opening fish up to secondary diseases like amoebic gill disease.

The impacts are already significant. In late 2024, barbed wire jellyfish (colonies that can reach 9 feet in length) struck two Scottish salmon farms, killing nearly 200,000 fish (SeafoodSource, 2024). In September 2022, micro jellyfish blooms caused 2.8 million salmon deaths across Scotland, the worst month for mortalities since records began (Fish Farming Expert, 2022). In Norway, millions of farmed salmon have died from jellyfish related injury over recent years, prompting the government to issue industry wide warnings (SeafoodSource, 2024; EFTTA, 2025).

The connection to climate change is well established, with warmer waters extending jellyfish seasons, altering the marine food web in their favour and creating conditions for larger, more frequent blooms.

Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs)

Harmful algal blooms occur when certain species of microalgae grow explosively, producing toxins or consuming so much oxygen that fish suffocate. They are one of the most economically devastating biological events in aquaculture and their frequency appears to be increasing in key production regions.

A single Pseudochattonella verruculosa bloom in Chile in 2015-16 caused an estimated $800 million in losses to the salmon industry (UNESCO/GlobalHAB White Paper). While in 2021, a Heterosigma akashiwo bloom in Chile's Comau fjord killed over 6,000 tonnes of salmon (León-Muñoz et al., Science of the Total Environment, 2022).

Globally, fish killing HABs caused over $8 billion in economic losses between 2000 and 2020, with the heaviest impacts in China, Chile and Japan (Mehdizadeh Allaf, Reviews in Aquaculture, 2024; HAEDAT database).

Photo: HAB (NOAA): “Many people use the term “red tide” to refer to harmful algal blooms, but not all HABs turn the water red. Blooms may appear in a variety of colors depending on the species of algae involved – and some HABs have no color at all. (With permisson from Kai Schumann)”

It’s no surprise that climate change is amplifying the risk here too. Warmer surface temperatures, altered rainfall patterns and intensified coastal upwelling all create conditions more favourable for bloom formation. This shows no sign of slowing down with Chile, the world's second largest salmon producer, is projected to become the most water stressed country in the Western Hemisphere by 2040 (MDPI Microorganisms, "Toxic Algal Bloom Recurrence in the Era of Global Change," 2023), a trajectory that will likely worsen HAB frequency and severity.

Pathogens (Bacteria, Viruses, Parasites)

All fish that we farm are ectotherms, meaning they cannot regulate their own body temperature. When water warms beyond their preferred range, their immune systems weaken at the same time that many pathogens thrive, which is about as bad a combination as you can get.

Bacteria are responsible for around 55% of aquaculture disease outbreaks globally (Mondal & Thomas, 2022; Frontiers in Marine Science). The most economically significant include Vibrio species, which cause vibriosis, a fast spreading infection that thrives in warm waters and has been directly linked to rising sea temperatures (Jeyachandran, Comparative Immunology Reports, 2025). Aeromonas salmonicida causes furunculosis in salmon, while Piscirickettsia salmonis is responsible for Salmon Rickettsial Syndrome (SRS) and has caused dramatic losses in Chile's salmon industry. Finally, Moritella viscosa is the primary cause of what the industry calls "winter wounds," which is worth expanding on because it illustrates the compounding nature of biological risk in aquaculture quite well.

Winter wounds are a compound problem. It’s not just warming waters that are a threat, cold snaps and subsequent cold water temperatures stress fish and make their skin more fragile, and physical damage from handling or mechanical lice treatments (thermolicers, hydrolicer jets) creates open sores. M. viscosa and other opportunistic bacteria then colonise those wounds, causing deep ulcers that spread through pens.

Winter wounds have been one of the leading welfare and mortality drivers in Norwegian salmon farming in recent years, with the January to May period the peak risk window (Manolin, "The Signals That Will Shape Aquaculture in 2026," Jan 2026; Aquabyte, "Using AI to Combat Winter Wounds," Feb 2026). It also illustrates how treating one biological problem (lice) can create another, as the mechanical delousing tools that reduce parasite loads also damage skin, opening the door to bacterial infection.

Viruses are responsible for some of the most catastrophic single events in aquaculture history. White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV) caused $6 billion in losses to shrimp aquaculture, and losses from shrimp diseases globally were estimated at $15 billion over 15 years to 2005 (PMC, "Viral Shrimp Diseases Listed by the OIE," 2022). Infectious Salmon Anaemia (ISA) alone cost Chile's salmon industry $2 billion and led to around 20,000 job losses (Leung & Bates, 2013; Frontiers in Aquaculture, 2025). While Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis Virus (IPNV) and Pancreas Disease (PD) remain endemic threats in Atlantic salmon.

Parasites beyond sea lice include amoebic gill disease (AGD), which is spreading to new regions as water temperatures rise, and microsporidians like Enterocytozoon hepatopenaei in shrimp, which caused over $570 million in losses in India alone (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2025).

A note on 2025

It is worth acknowledging that 2025, taken in isolation, was actually one of the calmer years for aquaculture biology in recent memory. There was no widespread disease collapse, no major ISA outbreaks, and industry wide mortality in Norway improved by a couple of percentage points year on year (Manolin, "The Signals That Will Shape Aquaculture in 2026," Jan 2026).

Other major producing regions including Chile and Scotland also experienced relatively stable biological conditions. Compared to recent years of winter wounds, jellyfish impacts and algal events, the disease picture was quiet. But that calm came against a backdrop of record sea temperatures, record lice pressure and record treatment activity, and as Manolin's analysis noted, calm biology under worsening environmental stress can mask structural fragility rather than signal improvement.

When multiple regions stay stable at once, prices compress from oversupply. When that stability breaks, and the environmental conditions are increasingly primed for it to break, the cost of response rises fast under the tighter margins the calm itself created. The trajectory of the underlying environmental drivers has not changed, and that is ultimately what matters for our investment thesis within this space.

Photo: Graph showing Salmon Farm Aggregate Mortality in Norway, 2025 data tracking in line with previous years. (Manolin, "The Signals That Will Shape Aquaculture in 2026," Jan 2026).

The Antibiotic Trap

The default industry response to bacterial disease has historically been antibiotics, but this approach is running into a wall. Antibiotic overuse in aquaculture is a major contributor to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), one of the World Health Organisation's top global health threats. Resistant bacteria do not stay confined to fish farms, they transfer resistance genes to other organisms including those affecting humans (Jeyachandran, Comparative Immunology Reports, 2025). The problem is particularly acute in parts of Asia and Latin America where antibiotic use in aquaculture remains poorly regulated.

Norway offers a counter example worth studying. In the 1980s, rapid growth in salmon farming led to a spike in antibiotic use, but a coordinated effort between the industry and government to develop and deploy fish vaccines drove a dramatic reduction in antibiotic consumption (Grave et al., 1990; Springer, World Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology, 2023), proving that large scale fish farming without routine antibiotic use is viable. Vaccination does have limits though, it does not work against all pathogens, particularly viruses in shrimp (which lack an adaptive immune system), and delivery at scale remains challenging.

The industry needs fundamentally different approaches to understanding, predicting and managing biological risk.

The Environmental Spillover

The biological risks facing aquaculture are not only an economic problem for farmers, they create cascading environmental damage when managed badly, and this is increasingly drawing regulatory and public scrutiny.

Disease from densely stocked farms spills over into wild populations. Sea lice are the clearest example, parasites that proliferate in open net pens spread to wild salmon migrating past farms, weakening already vulnerable stocks. Chemical treatments used to control lice and other pathogens, including pesticides added to feed or dumped directly into surrounding waters, pollute the broader marine environment. When farmed fish escape (which happens regularly during storms or equipment failures), they interbreed with wild populations, genetically weakening stocks that have evolved over millennia to survive in specific river systems.

There is also a deeper structural tension in the system. Salmon are carnivorous, they need to eat fish to grow. Much of the fishmeal and fish oil used in salmon feed is sourced from wild caught small pelagic species, including from stocks off West Africa that are critical to local food security. A recent report from the NGO Feedback detailed how major Norwegian salmon companies source fishmeal and fish oil from West African waters, undermining the livelihoods and nutrition of millions of people in the region (Feedback, "Blue Empire," Jan 2024). The industry designed to relieve pressure on wild fish stocks is, in some cases, contributing to their depletion elsewhere, and it is a tension that regulators and consumers are becoming more aware of.

This matters for the investment thesis. Better biological risk management reduces the environmental footprint of aquaculture itself. If you can control disease without chemical treatments, reduce mortality so fewer fish need to be stocked, and detect problems early enough to avoid mass die offs that pollute surrounding waters, you are solving an environmental problem as much as an economic one. Regulators are increasingly seeing it that way, Norway's traffic light system already constrains production growth based on wild salmon impact assessments and the regulatory ratchet is only tightening.

Where Technology Comes In: Dx and Rx

At UpRoot Capital, we think about biological risk technology through two lenses.

Dx, Prediction and Detection. Before you can treat a problem, you need to know it is coming. This category includes environmental monitoring (water quality, temperature, plankton), AI powered disease prediction models, computer vision for behavioural analysis, and early diagnostic tools that can identify pathogens before clinical symptoms appear. The goal is actionable intelligence, giving farmers enough lead time to intervene before losses occur.

Rx, Remediation and Treatment. Once you know what the problem is, how do you address it without defaulting to antibiotics? This includes biological controls (vaccines, immune stimulants, probiotics), genetic approaches (selective breeding for disease resistance), physical interventions (lice treatments, jellyfish barriers), and novel therapeutics.

The most exciting opportunity we see is in the symbiosis between the two. Early warning Dx technology that can predict when waters are likely to warm, flag the early signs of disease from environmental signals and give operators a window to act, paired with Rx solutions that can boost year round immunity, respond to critical moments with targeted biological interventions and do so without creating the antibiotic dependence that has plagued the industry for decades. The companies that can close that loop, from prediction to prevention, are the ones we think will define the next generation of aquaculture infrastructure to manage biological risk.

Photo: (IEE Spectrum) Tidal’s AI platform tracks both fish and food pellets (top) and can then automatically adjust feed rates to limit waste and reduce costs. The system’s sensors can detect sea lice on the salmon (center), which enables farmers to intervene early and track trends. The real-time estimation of biomass (bottom) gives farmers information about both average weight and population distribution, helping them plan the timing of harvests. (TidalX AI)

The Direction of Travel

Capital is already flowing into aquaculture technology, and the exits are starting to prove the thesis.

In 2025, Aquabyte, an AI powered monitoring platform for salmon farmers providing computer vision based weight estimation, lice counting, welfare scoring and feeding optimisation, was acquired by Vitruvian Partners, a UK based PE firm with over $20 billion in active funds (Aquabyte, press release, 2025). Tidal AI, which spent six years developing underwater AI monitoring technology within Alphabet's X (Google's innovation lab), spun out as an independent company in 2024, backed by Perry Creek Capital, Ichthus Venture Capital and Futurum Ventures (We Are Aquaculture, Aug 2024). Manolin, meanwhile, has established itself as a leading data intelligence and predictive disease modelling platform for aquaculture operators.

A major growth investor acquiring an aquaculture AI company, and Google's parent company spinning one out with serious backing, are certainly strong signals. Specialist aquaculture focused funds are emerging too, Ichthus Venture Capital (backed by Norwegian seafood conglomerate Kverva), Hatch Blue (the leading aquaculture focused accelerator and fund) and Futurum Ventures are all actively deploying.

Much of the first wave of investment, though, has focused on the Dx side, monitoring, analytics, computer vision, primarily in Atlantic salmon. That layer is consolidating. The next wave of opportunity could like quite different.

Rx is still wide open. The remediation and treatment side, biological controls, immune stimulants, novel therapeutics that can replace antibiotic dependency, remains early stage and underfunded relative to the scale of the problem. Companies like Aquit, which is developing biotech solutions that harness a fish's own immune system proteins to induce systemic disease resistance, represent the kind of novel, non chemical approach the industry desperately needs.

Next generation Dx has not been fully built yet either. The first wave focused on what you can see, camera based monitoring of fish behaviour, lice counts, weight estimation. The next layer goes deeper, environmental genomics, eDNA based pathogen detection and microbiome monitoring that can identify disease risk from water samples before clinical symptoms appear. Metabix Biotech, a Uruguayan company building AI driven pathogen prediction from environmental samples, is an early example of this (PitchBook; LinkedIn).

Beyond salmon, the gap is enormous. Most aquaculture technology investment has targeted the Norwegian and Chilean salmon industries. Shrimp farming in Southeast Asia, tilapia in Africa and shellfish globally face equally severe biological threats with far less monitoring infrastructure. These are massive markets with acute, growing pain points and almost no technology penetration.

The UpRoot View

Aquaculture is one of the most important food systems on the planet, and it is under biological siege. Climate change is the accelerant, warmer waters mean more lice, more jellyfish, more algal blooms and more virulent pathogens. The industry's historical reliance on antibiotics is creating a separate crisis in antimicrobial resistance, and the environmental damage from poor disease management is drawing increasing regulatory and public pressure.

The companies that will define the next decade of aquaculture are those building the diagnostic and remediation tools to manage biological risk intelligently. This is textbook PIB territory, pests, invasives and biological risks made worse by a changing climate, and it is exactly where we focus at UpRoot Capital.

We will be watching this space closely.

UpRoot Capital backs early stage companies helping industries monitor and manage pests, invasive species and biological risks accelerated by climate change.

The Opportunity To Bring Biological Risks In Aquaculture Under Control