Salmon Farms and Hatcheries: Partners in Crime or Guilt by Association?

Jeremy Brown, is a 2002 Food and Society Fellow, supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. An albacore troller and longliner, he hasn’t swung a salmon gaff in eight years. He can be reached at fvoneandall@hotmail.com.

Editor’s Note: This is the second article in a series by Jeremy Brown about the unfolding salmon recovery debate.

Part Two

Over the years, the fisheries of traditional salmon-harvesting groups have become dependent upon hatcheries for a significant portion of their catch. Given the similarities between hatcheries and salmon farms, fish-farming advocates and hatchery critics believe criticism on the part of traditional salmon harvesters of salmon farming is hypocritical and self-serving.

As we discussed last month, the rebuilding of wild-salmon runs requires broad support from diverse and often antagonistic groups.1 The argument between traditional salmon harvesters, fish farms and hatcheries serves to chill discussion of policy options among wild salmon advocates, allowing less-desirable outcomes to proceed unchecked.

Salmon farms and hatcheries only superficially seem to be the same. The distinction between them is summed up as follows: The purpose, practice and function of hatcheries are to supplement natural processes. The purpose, function and practice of fish farming2 are to supplant those processes.

Furthermore, while hatcheries deal exclusively with species native to the region, fish farms almost exclusively use Atlantic salmon, an alien species.

A panel of qualified scientists named the Puget Sound and Coastal Washington Hatchery Reform Project is presently reviewing the shortcomings of hatchery operations. This is entirely appropriate, since constant improvement of husbandry is a fundamental responsibility of stewardship.

In the following short guide to the distinctions between the two, I indicate how fish farms should bear similar scrutiny.

The principal criticism of fish farms is pollution. Fish farm proponents in turn argue that fish-processing operations emit more organic waste than do fish farms, however, every fish plant operates under strict emissions permits, the criteria for which can be debated in the appropriate forum.

It should be pointed out that fish-processing plants are returning organic matter that came from the marine environment back to that marine environment – nothing added, but much removed. The 20-feet-deep “plumes” that are found at some Alaska processing locations3 have had a century to accumulate, for most of that time under no or lax regulation. Once again, using historical evidence to substantiate a current argument is not valid.

The four Cypress Island Inc. fish cages in Rich Passage, across from Seattle, produce an estimated 5,181,120 pounds of untreated waste a year. For this, the operator pays nothing. By contrast, directly across the water, the West Point Treatment Plant, operated by the city of Seattle, releases 4,004,000 pounds of treated (sterile) solids per year, at a cost to the taxpayer of $80 million per year to operate and a half-billion dollars in capital investment!4

To compare numbers of juvenile hatchery fish released to adult fish farm escapees is disingenuous. For example, in his widely circulated comments Bill Waknitz compares eyed eggs, smolt or fry of wild fish with only those escaped adult farm fish that are reported. In each case, the numbers used for hatchery fish are chosen to most grossly inflate them. Given the customary survival from eggs to adult of fractions of 1 percent, there is no meaningful comparison to be made.

If a hatchery’s sole function is to provide fish for harvest, then it is reasonable to expect that a well-managed fishery would catch the majority of these fish. Similarly, if the purpose of a hatchery is to revive failing runs, one would expect that harvest of these fish would be intentionally minimized.

The numbers used for escaped Atlantic salmon (there is no reliable way to count escaped farmed Pacific salmon) are based on those reported only as the law requires. For example, in an impromptu study conducted after just one large release of about 35,000 Atlantic salmon off northern Vancouver Island in 2000, researcher Alexandra Morton accounted for 10,233 recaptured Atlantic salmon. Nonetheless, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans reported only 7,833 recovered on the entire B.C. coast for the whole year!5

Atlantic salmon escape into the region’s waters in vast numbers each year. Some of them travel considerable distances and enter freshwater systems. Dr. John Volpe of the University of Alberta found adult Atlantic salmon in 80 percent of the B.C. streams he surveyed. Reports of Atlantic salmon in Puget Sound-area rivers and in Alaska are also frequent. Successful spawning was thought to be impossible, yet the evidence suggests that under the right conditions spawning will occur, and the offspring will be viable.6 Comprehensive and controlled surveys are the missing necessity.

“Juvenile Atlantic salmon differ considerably from native Pacific salmonid species in behavior and habitat preferences, making them less likely to be observed by survey crews used to dealing exclusively with native species… While only seven rivers have been identified as holding juvenile Atlantic salmon, it must be noted that less than 1 percent of potential rearing habitat on Vancouver Island alone has been surveyed,” Volpe says.7

Fish farm proponents frequently point out that there have been numerous attempts in the past eighty years to establish Atlantic salmon in the Pacific, and that these have all failed. Atlantic salmon, they insist, simply are not good colonizers outside their historical range.8 This is incorrect.

First, biological invasions succeed when there is an opportunity, available niche or lack of competition from native species. These earlier attempts to establish Atlantic salmon took place in the face of healthy native stocks, distributed throughout their range.

Secondly, Atlantic salmon, indeed all salmonids, are extremely good colonizers. Ten thousand years ago there were no salmon at all within 500 miles of the watersheds in which they now live, both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Those rivers were under hundreds of feet of ice! Salmon were among the first creatures to reclaim those systems as the ice sheets retreated. This happened not once, but many times, as the ice events advanced and retreated.

Consumers are becoming increasingly reluctant to accept claims that residual hormones, antibiotics and vaccines in their food are of no concern. From a simple public health perspective, continual exposure to background levels of antibiotics renders those drugs less effective when they are needed to protect human health.9 To sacrifice those public health protections in order to boost animal growth, and hence profit, is immoral.

Yet this is routinely the case.

The most common antibiotic used on farmed salmon is oxytetracycline, with 6.4 metric tonnes used on B.C. salmon farms in 1998.10 Others include fluorfenicol and a class known as sulfonamides. It has been shown that oxytetracycline is poorly absorbed by the intestinal tract of the salmon.

Consequently much of the drug is excreted unchanged into the marine environment where it distributes itself between the sediment and water column or is ingested by wild sea life. Studies show that some antibiotics, including oxytetracycline and fluorfenicol, persist in the environment, and marine sediment acts as a long-term reservoir.

Atlantic salmon were introduced before many of the diseases affecting Pacific salmon were identified. Therefore, it is impossible to determine if Atlantic salmon were or were not a vector for the introduction of these diseases. We do know beyond dispute that Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) was introduced to North America from Europe by imported Atlantic salmon eggs.

ISA outbreaks in Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces have lead to the destruction of millions of Atlantic salmon in an effort to stop the spread of the disease.11 ISA is a flu-like viral disease that causes internal bleeding and is generally fatal in fish. As with any intensive monoculture or concentrated “feedlot” operation, fish farms become incubation sites to greatly increase the possibility of infection, reinfection and persistence of diseases and parasites.

“Sea Lice12 are the least of our concerns….Sea Lice have not been a significant problem in the British Columbia salmon farms,13 ” says Kevin Bright, president of Washington Fish Growers Association.

This may not be a concern for him, but the evidence shows it is a major concern for wild fish.

In 2002, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans projection for the return of wild pink salmon to the Broughton Archipelago district off northern Vancouver Island was 3.615 million fish. With excellent ocean conditions, runs up and down the coast returned well above predictions except for this one area, where eventually only 147,000 spawners could be tallied, despite a complete shut down of fishing.

While the Canadian government14 expressed surprise, this 96 percent collapse of the run was predicted by researcher Alexandra Morton.15 In 2001, Morton had extensively sampled out-migrating pink salmon and established that they were picking up lethal amounts of sea lice as they passed salmon farms on their passage to the ocean.

While sea lice occur naturally and are often found on mature Pacific salmon, they would generally only be encountered later in life, in far lower numbers. Salmon farms act as “bioaccumulaters” to create persistent concentrations of the free-swimming chalimus-stage lice, a lethal gauntlet through which the vulnerable juvenile wild salmon have to pass.

When farmed salmon first entered the marketplace, it did not create new markets for itself. Instead, it underpriced its way into traditional wild salmon markets. The oversupply of farmed salmon is the principle cause of the collapse in salmon prices.16

The shift from dispersed, moderate-income owner-operators to vertically structured, transnational corporations has decreased employment and exported income from the fishing communities to corporate headquarters, which are all, with one exception, in Europe.

It is simplistic and irrelevant to suggest that salmon harvesting should become more efficient in order to compete. Salmon harvesting has been kept deliberately inefficient in order to maintain the distribution of benefit among the greatest number of participants and to moderate the impact on the resource. To increase efficiency would mean either decreasing employment, increasing impact on the resource, or both.

Fish farms are unlikely to go away just because some of us don’t like them even if they are demonstrably bad for the environment and despite the fact that they have endured significant economic hardship as a result of their market intrusion. Neither are hatcheries likely to go away because they have been unable to anticipate and respond to shifting expectations and standards of salmon recoveries rapidly proliferating pundits.

Both must be judged by their own respective merits and faults. As presented in this article and by fish farm proponents elsewhere, neither industry is blameless, but it is my contention that hatcheries have many valuable and essential qualities, while the raising of Atlantic salmon in open net pens in the Pacific environment has yet to make its case. §

Frankenfish! Genetically Engineered Superfish Are Just Around the Corner.