AI trained on 120,000 images beats biologists at spotting salmon lice

This is the unglamorous end of applied AI, and it is exactly where the technology tends to prove itself fastest, since a narrow, well-defined visual task like counting parasite larvae is much easier to nail than open-ended reasoning. Cutting a 30-hour expert task down to 30 minutes with better accuracy is a real productivity story for wild salmon conservation and aquaculture, not a demo. It is a good reminder that some of AI's most useful wins this year will keep showing up in fisheries and farms rather than in flagship model launches.