With regard to drugs, antibiotics, and/or sea lice, I will group them for this discussion into one: sea lice treatments. We use a number of strategies in order to minimize release of drugs into the environment. We use feeding strategies if and when we have to medicate, which as Mary Ellen has indicated is very rare. We focus on prevention so that we minimize the number of treatments, and in most cases the number of treatments on a farm in an entire production cycle is very small; maybe one or two is very common. That will occur over a five- to seven-day period. So this is a very small portion of the feed production throughout the entire production cycle of that farm.
During those production cycles, we also use as very low levels of drugs as we can that are effective. We also manipulate feed rates in order to minimize...so that there is no feed left that's going out into the system unconsumed. We focus very much on those. In addition to that, we've participated on projects over the years where we've looked at and tried to identify drugs in the environment, in the benthic, post treatments. We've had systems where we've had animals in sentinel cages beneath the system and looked for and tested for drug residues in those sentinel species, whether they be prawns or shellfish in the areas. We've never had a problem with that. When we've done those projects, the results have always been very positive as far as no detection of drug.
That gives me great comfort as a veterinarian that what I'm doing is not having an impact in that way. I believe the doctor you referred to, maybe Dr. Ikonomou, has done some research on Slice. We have been participating in that research project where he's been looking at trying to detect levels of Slice or sea lice treatment in spot prawns in and around farms. The detection limit he's getting is so sensitive that he feels he's been able to detect it at times during a treatment.
We're participating in activities such as that so that we continue to understand whether there is any impact.