Northernlightswolf’s Weblog

Wild salmon are endangered. Period. Nothing more needs to be said. (Interestingly, Alaska, who allows people to shoot wolves from planes, actually operates a sustainable wild salmon fishery that puts British Columbia and the rest of the Pacific coast to shame… go figure).

Nearly all salmon farms in Canada are around Vancouver Island. Five international companies — three based in Norway — control most existing farms. If we are going to farm salmon, why don’t we control the farms? But I digress.

Fish farms are a bad idea. Farmed salmon are an alien species, fed antibiotics, pesticides, synthetic pigments, and all sorts of other nasty chemicals… which we then eat. And we wonder why cancer rates in humans are going sky high.

Pesticides fed to the fish and toxic copper sulfate used to keep nets free of algae are building up in seafloor sediments. Antibiotics have created resistant strains of disease that infect wild and domesticated fish. Human-made contaminants, PCBs, and dioxins make their way into the ocean and are absorbed by marine life. The pollutants accumulate in fat that is distilled into the concentrated fish oil, which, in turn, is a prime ingredient of the salmon feed. Besides toxic chemicals, parasites are an issue. Sea lice are enjoying the party at the fish farms: clouds of lice swarm nearby wild salmon on their migration routes, and up to 75% of these nearby populations of wild salmon are covered with a fatal load of sea lice (which burrow into fish and feed on skin, mucous and blood).

Of all the concerns about fish farms, the biggest turns out to be a problem fish farms were supposed to help alleviate: the destruction of marine life through overfishing. Salmon are carnivores, and the farmed fish must be fed. It takes about 2.4 pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed salmon. Hello? Some people say, if you want to help save salmon, eat more sardines! Sounds counter-intuitive, but we would use up far less sardines and that harvest would be more sustainable.

The farmed fish industry has grown so huge in the last couple of decades, that it recognizes it soon will be pushing the limits of the ocean. “There will come a time when our industry will (need) … more of the fish oil and fish meal than is available,” said Odd Grydeland, an executive at Heritage Salmon in British Columbia.

Well, the solution is easy: why not feed them corn? They could probably get some cheap, genetically modified “corn” from Monsanto (here is a link of interest http://www.percyschmeiser.com/). Feeding corn to fish may sound like a joke (it was meant as one)… but listen to this from an salmon farm industry spokesman:

“Our biggest challenge is to find substitute grains for fish meal and fish oil.”

Uh… that is as wrong as feeding ground up cows to cows. Yes – the beef you eat from the grocery store is not a happy herbivore prancing about the fields like they were meant to. But I digress.

Ecologically, fish farming is a disaster. About 1 million live Atlantic salmon, an alien species to the Pacific Northwest, have escaped through holes in nets and storm-wrecked farms. Biologists fear these invaders will out-compete Pacific salmon and trout for food and territory, hastening the demise of the native fish. An Atlantic salmon takeover could wreak havoc on our still healthy, diverse marine habitat.

But, I know most humans don’t really care about what happens to wildlife or ecosystems… only if it affects us. Well, try this on for size: European health studies have suggested that there is human health risk from synthetic pigment added to the feed to give farmed salmon their pink hue. That’s right, the farmed salmon would be an unappetizing pale grey without the pink chemicals. In the wild, salmon become pink from eating pink krill.

So, on a non-wolf related rant, I am suggesting we all boycott farmed salmon – it’s not good for you, nor is it good for our environment. And stop eating wild salmon until our government gets its act together and promotes a sustainable west coast fishery.

Casey Black