Methods for Pre-slaughter mortality of farmed shrimp

Preface

This document is supplemental to our report discussing pre-slaughter mortality in farmed shrimp, which is part of the Rethink Priorities’ Shrimp Welfare Sequence.

Here, we detail the methods used to estimate the pre-slaughter mortality rate of farmed shrimps—that is, the proportion of shrimps born and/or raised on farms that die prior to intentionally being killed for food. We focus on the three most farmed species, Penaeus vannamei, Penaeus monodon, and Macrobrachium rosenbergii. Often data for the latter included Macrobrachium nipponese, so we group the under them label Macrobrachium. There are three chapters covering:

1. Modeling shrimp pre-slaughter mortality using survival curves
2. Comparing our estimates to others found in the literature
3. Comparing our estimates to mortality estimates for other farmed taxa and wild shrimp.

See the GitHub repository for the data used and the README file for a description of the data.