Aquaculture welfare
- commitment
- 10 hrs/week
- flexibility
- Open to proposals
The project
I'll be mentoring projects on welfare interventions for farmed crustaceans, particularly shrimp and prawns. This includes humane slaughter methods (ice-slurry stunning, electrical stunning, and alternatives), practical welfare indicators for commercial aquaculture settings, and water quality management to prevent disease-driven suffering. I'm also open to supervising research on fish health and histopathology projects that intersect with disease and parasite reduction.
The mentee's role
The mentee would lead the legwork: literature and grey-literature searching, synthesising findings, and drafting the report under my guidance. Sample tasks include mapping existing stunning technologies and their cost, pulling together evidence on farmer decision-making, interviewing or surveying contacts in my network (I can facilitate introductions), and writing up. I'd shape direction, give feedback on drafts, and connect them to farmers and researchers in the field.
Who I'm looking for
Must-haves:
- Self-directed, reliable, and genuinely interested in aquatic animal welfare or aquaculture
- Comfortable working independently between calls and able to turn feedback into progress
Nice-to-haves:
- Some background in animal or veterinary science, aquaculture, or welfare research
- Experience in a low or middle income context
- Comfort with writing, whether research, grants, or outreach
Questions for applicants
- Which of my areas of work interests you most, and why?
- Roughly how many hours a week could you commit?
Support offered
- Domain expertise in aquatic animal welfare and aquaculture
- Shaping research direction
- Grant writing and project scoping
- Feedback on drafts
- Connecting mentees to my network of researchers, farmers and NGOs in the field
- format
- Research & writing · Field-building & outreach · Project scoping
- topic
- Neglected animal groups · Tools for advocates · Macrostrategy · Wild animal welfare
Wasseem Emam
Ethical Seafood Research (Founder and Executive Director); Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Complutense University of Madrid (Researcher)
I'm the founder and director of Ethical Seafood Research, a UK-registered non-profit working on aquatic animal welfare. I'm running shrimp welfare intervention trials in Egypt testing enrichment and ice-slurry stunning protocols, and have experience translating welfare science into practice in low- and middle-income aquaculture contexts. My background includes fish health, histopathology and welfare indicator validation. Crustacean welfare remains an underdeveloped area with significant scope for tractable, measurable impact, especially around slaughter and welfare assessment.