Well, one of the difficulties that Norway has in studying disease impacts in wild fish is that there are so few fish out there for them to capture and study. They've been limited to looking at migrating adults that are returning to spawn or at juveniles that are going out, but they are really unable to catch fish in the ocean because they're just not dense enough.
My work with them has been to recapitulate some of the tracking studies that have been merged with FIT-CHIP and infectious agent monitoring, and also to look at the role of exposure to farms. They have been doing tracking studies on where fish go and their migratory behaviour, but they've never been able to link physiology, disease and those kinds of aspects in those studies. Our program focuses on non-lethal detection of infection and stress, so we're able to carry out these studies on fish populations of conservation concern without mortality to those fish. That's where I think Canada is absolutely ahead of the game. It's not only because of my research but also the work that I do with universities, which are really leading the charge when it comes to the tracking studies. This is a game-changer, to be able to actually study these processes in a non-lethal way. It's like taking a saliva test in a human.