The interest of fish welfare is increasing, both in Norway and internationally, leading to an increasing need for scientific knowledge about basic and applied questions related to how farmed fish are produced. The strategic institute programme (SIP) ”Welfare in farmed fish” was financed by the Research Council of Norway, for the five years period from 1 January 2001 to 31 December 2005. The core partners in the SIP were the Norwegian Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture Research (Fiskeriforskning) in Tromsø, Institute of Marine Research (IMR) in Bergen and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB) at Ås. The general aim of the programme was to increase the basic competence about fish welfare by the integration of scientific fields such as fish behaviour, fish physiology and fish health as tools to understand welfare related topics in farmed fish, and to use these tools to evaluate fish welfare based on the animal’s behavioural needs. This report aims at giving the reader an insight in the scientific work carried out in this strategic research programme and the progress made in this relatively new scientific field of aquaculture research. Chapter 3 gives a conceptual and theoretic background of animal welfare, and chapter 4 describes the methodological progress financed in part by the programme. Chapter 5-11 reports results and progress related to both basic and more applied fish welfare research which gives an illustration of the interdisciplinary nature of the subject.

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