Marine Harvest can easily absorb this loss on a single farm, but the lice have spread to most of Aarskog’s farms. Between 2015 and 2017 his total harvest across 220 farms declined by 12 percent. Some of Aarskog’s competitors have been hit even harder. The problem, he says, has “reached the status of a nightmare.”

Microscopic Foe of the Blue Revolution

Aarskog grew up on a sheep farm on the coast of Norway not far from Frøya. At 6 years old, he was herding sheep up mountains to get to the high pastures. By 8, his father had taught him how to slaughter sheep himself. “I had a great childhood but was working long hours before it is probably legal to work. What do you call it in America? Child Protection Services? They would have been visiting my parents,” he jokes. Now 50, Aarskog is a fitness freak who competes year-round as a trail runner, mountain biker, and cross-country skier. His business generates billions a year in revenue, but he still thinks of himself as a guy from a farm.

Aarskog’s goal now is to help mobilize a “blue revolution,” as he describes it, “in which aquaculture will eventually replace wild-caught seafood and provide sustainable protein to billions of people.” His competitors, he says, aren’t other commercial fisheries but rather big meat producers like Tyson Food and Smithfield—"that’s the market share I’m after.” He cites data on the environmental consequences of meat production, declaring, “grain-fed beef should be forbidden.” It takes about seven pounds of feed to produce a pound of beef, two to produce a pound of chicken, but a pound of farmed salmon, according to Aarskog, requires less than 1.2 pounds of feed.

According to United Nations data, the global demand for seafood will grow at least 40 percent in the next two decades given current population and economic trends. But wild populations of almost every fish species, including salmon, are declining because of overfishing, climate change, and other environmental pressures. “There will be no way to meet the new demand without farming it,” says Josh Goldman, owner of Australis, an aquaculture company. But whether farmed seafood can be sustainable on a mass scale is the subject of much debate.

Marine Harvest hopes to mobilize a “blue revolution” that provides sustainable protein to billions of people. Knut Egil Wang/Institute

The environmental challenges of salmon farming go well beyond sea lice. Farmers need to manage the fish waste, prevent escapes, and are responsible for harvesting huge quantities of wild fish—anchovies and herring, among them—which provide the oils and meal used in salmon feed production. Aarskog has signed onto goals set with environmental groups, including the World Wildlife Fund, to create a zero-lice, zero-waste, zero-escapes company. “Not long ago, this was a young, cowboyish industry,” says Ingrid Lomelde, policy director for WWF Norway. “But there’s been tremendous progress, a change of mindset: They understand they can’t grow if they aren’t sustainable.” Aarskog also envisions eliminating wild fish from his feed, instead sourcing Omega 3 oils from micro-algae and proteins from plants.

Salmon farming today represents a small part of the global aquaculture industry—cheaper fish like tilapia, carp, and catfish are produced in much larger quantities, largely for Asian markets—but it’s the fastest-growing sector and by far the most profitable. “This is where the big R&D investment and innovation is happening,” says Goldman, who has benefitted from advances in salmon aquaculture even though he raises the white tropical fish barramundi. “The use of energy-dense fish feeds and underwater camera installations—we owe that to the salmon industry. From a tech standpoint, where it goes, so go many other kinds of aquaculture.”

Aarskog knows he can’t sustain his company’s growth, let alone increase it, if he doesn’t first face down his microscopic bloodsucking foe. So he and other industry leaders have mounted a technological arms race against superlice, investing billions in possible solutions, some of which are as strange and improbable as the lice themselves.

Robots, Lasers, and Containment Eggs

We’re shivering on the rim of a cage at a Marine Harvest farm off the coast of Molde, a village south of Frøya. Thousands of fish are circling the top of the cage, jumping and diving as they jockey for feed pellets that are falling like confetti from a suspended plastic hose. The fish don’t seem bothered that it’s 5 degrees below zero Fahrenheit outside, or that among them, puttering darkly, is a mechanical novelty: a robot the shape of R2D2 and twice the height that’s shooting green laser beams in all directions.

The Stingray uses lasers to target sea lice on the bodies of swimming salmon. Stingray

This device, dubbed Stingray, is one of the more eccentric weapons Aarskog is testing in his war against sea lice. Built by deep sea oil industry engineers specifically for lice extermination, Stingray “watches” the fish via live video feed and uses AI programming similar to the facial recognition software on your iPhone. It identifies aberrations in color and texture on the fish’s scales. When it detects a louse, the bot zaps it with a surgical diode laser beam, the kind used for eye surgery and hair removal. The mirror-like scales reflect the beam, leaving the fish unscathed. But sea lice are gelatinous, roughly the consistency of an egg white, so they fry to a crisp and float away. While laser beams generally travel slower underwater than they do through air, beams of certain colors and wavelengths can travel through water with high accuracy.