Comment North 2
Keeping northern BC fish farm free
Calling a floating net pen filled with domesticated salmon a fish “farm” is akin to calling a commercial feedlot for cattle a ranch. Crowded unnaturally together in cages, farmed salmon are subject to epidemic outbreaks of diseases and parasites that can impact wild salmon and other fish. Unused food, fish feces, and a host of chemicals used to protect the fish from diseases and parasites fall to the sea bed, creating a biological “dead zone” beneath the net pens, and polluting nearby marine waters.
Open-pen farming of Atlantic salmon began in Norway and spread to Scotland in the 1960s. The spread of diseases and parasites soon became a problem and by the 1980s furunculosis-infected farm fish escaped in Norway and spread the disease to 550 farms and 20 rivers.
Norway spent $100 million to slaughter the stock of 20 sea farms in an attempt to stop an outbreak of furunculosis that was imported with salmon smolts from Scotland. Infectious salmon anemia spread from fish farms to wild populations of salmon and trout, and the parasite Gyrodactylus salaris decimated many runs of wild Atlantic salmon. Norway poisoned off wild stocks in 35 of the world’s best Atlantic salmon rivers in an effort to eradicate this parasite, brought to its waters with salmon smolts imported from Sweden.
The first salmon farm in Canada was established in 1971. When the Norwegian government began to implement stricter regulations for the aquaculture industry in its own country, Norwegian interests began to take over the BC aquaculture industry in the mid-’80s, importing the fish they had domesticated for a life in floating sea pens—the Atlantic salmon—and with it the same problems which had occurred elsewhere. All but one aquaculture company in BC is now foreign-owned.
By the 1990s the wild sea-trout and Atlantic salmon of western Scotland and Ireland, and the sport-fishing industry that depended on them, were devastated by sea lice infestations from fish farms located at the mouths of rivers where migrating salmon smolts would be exposed to clouds of sea lice.
In an effort to protect its valuable commercial salmon fishery, Alaska banned open-pen fish farms in its coastal waters, as escaped Atlantic salmon from BC started turning up in commercial fishnets as far north as the Aleutian Islands.
It was to be expected that British Columbia’s wild salmon would also be affected by exposure to the sea lice that surround fish farms in the bays of the Sunshine Coast. Researcher Alexandra Morton began warning about just such an impact when she discovered that chum and pink salmon fry in the Broughton Archipelago were covered with sea lice after passing the fish farms.
It’s been suggested that open-pen fish farms floating in our coastal waters should be removed and replaced with closed-containment systems, either on land or in the water. Closed containment would mean that effluents, diseases and parasites would not enter into the natural environment and that farmed salmon could not escape into the wild. All such systems are still in the experimental stage and the industry claims that they are too expensive to operate.
Even if cost-effective systems were developed, there are still several significant problems to be addressed. At present, farmed salmon are fed a diet rich in protein from wild sources such as anchovies, and the conversion rate is about three pounds of wild fish to one pound of farmed fish. To provide a cheap luxury food, we are depleting the oceans of protein much-needed by wild salmon and other marine life.
Critics point out that raising salmon to eat is like raising tigers by feeding them cattle. It makes much more sense to raise a herbivorous fish like tilapia or carp.
Each year hundreds of thousands of farmed salmon escape into the inshore waters of coastlines around the North Atlantic, and many of these farm escapees enter rivers in order to spawn. Escaped fish now make up more than half of the commercial catch of “wild” fish in Norway and up to 25% of the catch in Scotland.
Escaped farm salmon have been caught in many rivers in BC, including the Skeena and other northern rivers, and their progeny has been discovered in several rivers on Vancouver Island. While the escaped Atlantics cannot breed with their Pacific cousins, they do compete with them for food and spawning areas, and transmit diseases and parasites.
The nearest fish farm to the Skeena River is in Klemtu: it is hard to imagine what would be the impact of moving farms to Kitkatla, just south of the estuary of the Skeena River. Dr. Allen Gottesfeld’s research has shown that the Skeena’s out-migrating salmon smolts pass through this region and, if farms are sited there, would be exposed to the sea lice that congregate around the pens.
The Norwegian government’s recent Committee on preserving Norway’s wild salmon views the escape of farmed salmon and outbreaks of salmon lice as “the most serious environmental problems of the fish farming industry in relation to wild salmon.”
Surely, it is only sensible to declare the Skeena, Nass and other northern BC rivers fish farm-free to protect our wild salmon. The Skeena watershed’s wild salmon legacy should not be traded for a feedlot future.
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