Two weeks ago a Cooke Aquaculture salmon farm in Washington state had a catastrophic failure, releasing about 150,000 Atlantic salmon into the Salish Sea. I live in the San Juan Islands not far from the wrecked fish farm and have been monitoring the situation since then.
On Saturday August 19 the open net-pen anchored in the swift currents near Cypress Island began to break apart and by Sunday it had collapsed. At the time, an unknown number of the 305,000 captive salmon escaped; since then Cooke has transferred enough remaining fish to say about half were lost.
The first any of us heard about this was on Monday August 21 after Lummi Tribal fishermen reported pulling up Atlantics while out fishing for native Chinooks near Bellingham Bay. By Tuesday, Cooke and Washington Department Fish and Wildlife posted press releases describing the massive fish release. Initially Cooke blamed the collapse on unexpectedly high “eclipse tides” which they walked back in a day or two after being widely mocked for the ridiculous excuse (astronomical conditions are a basic component of tide predictions, and like the eclipse, are easily determined far in advance). Cooke also low-balled the number of escaped salmon as 4-5000. The state publicly encouraged anyone with a fishing license to catch as many Atlantics as they could, no limit, as a way to remove these invasive fish from local waters. The escaped fish are 8-10 pounds each, and were near harvest.
People all over the Northwest have been seeing and pulling up these fish over the last 10 days. Within a few days of the collapse Lummi fishermen alone had collected 50,000 pounds worth and they continue to fish. On Thursday the 24th smelt fishers on Lopez Island caught many in Mud Bay and the next day Kwiaht, a local science research and education organization that regularly seines at nearby Watmough Bay, pulled in 56 Atlantics there.
Kwiaht has a license to seine in order to monitor juvenile fish populations migrating through the islands in summer. They were hoping to find juvenile Chinooks heading seaward from natal rivers, but found full-grown Atlantics instead. Others of my neighbors reported salmon off Odlin Park and Hunter Bay. Someone on my Facebook feed reported several small pods of orcas feeding on jumping Atlantics off Johns Island. Orca experts say these were Transient/Biggs orcas rather than the Southern Resident orcas who have been mostly missing from the San Juans this summer due to a dearth of Chinooks, sadly.
I live within walking/bicycling distance of four bays on Lopez and over the past week I’ve checked on them daily. Only one has the escapees: Aleck Bay, which like Watmough, Hunter and Mud Bays, faces east, the direction Cypress lies. The other bays face west. I first saw the salmon last Friday (a few days after the pen collapse) and there were many — at least 100 based on timing and location of splashes — jumping at one end of the bay, all in shallow water not far from the beach and along the headland. Over the weekend the bay was still packed with salmon, and several visiting boaters and weekenders were out catching them.
Visiting boaters:
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Weekenders:
This week, Monday and Tuesday there was less splashing but Wednesday and Thursday it picked up again. After two weeks there are still plenty of Atlantics milling around. Wildlife have been paying attention too: I've seen otters and gulls amongst the jumping fish, and turkey vultures working on carcasses on the beach.
Since the release, these farmed Atlantic fish have spread throughout the Salish Sea and out beyond Strait of Juan de Fuca. Swinomish tribal fishers have caught them in the Skagit River, and they’ve been seen in the lower Nooksack and Samish also. The state has requested folks to report locations of catches but I know not everyone is reporting since the map does not show catches I have personally seen.
Reporting map, as of August 31:
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Why do we care?
Farmed-fish proponents say Atlantic salmon pose no risk to the local environment because they can not interbreed (Atlantics, Salmo salar, are genetically distinct from our local species, genus Onchorhyncus) — which is true — and that previous deliberate and accidental releases haven’t established themselves in our rivers (a more problematic claim).
However, given the fragile state of our native salmon species, most of which have threatened or endangered status, the added stresses of these invasives could make their situation worse.
There is concern they will prey on juvenile salmon or other scarce fish, or compete with native fish for declining prey — salmon are carnivorous. So far, biologists checking the stomachs of captured escapees have found them empty, likely because these fish have been fed pellets their whole life and never hunted. Right now they are living off their fat. However many of them have been caught with bait on a fishing line, so they still have the hunting instinct. So if they get hungry enough….? Some local salmon runs are heading upstream right now; Lummi fishermen are concerned that Atlantics will follow them and prey on eggs. A stomach-contents study published in 1997 examined about a tenth of the Atlantic salmon caught along the Washington-BC-Alaska coastline over several years, previous fish farm escapees. 77% of those fish had empty stomachs, meaning about a quarter of the nonnative fish — many thousands — were finding enough local food to survive.
Another serious risk these farmed fish present is spreading disease or parasites to native fish. Fish in crowded pens are notoriously vulnerable to contagious diseases which spread explosively between fish in close proximity. One is sea lice, a bloodsucking arthropod ectoparasite that all fish farms deal with, usually using regular doses of pesticides, these days most commonly the drug SLICE, which sea lice are now becoming resistant to. So far, these captured salmon appear free from sea lice. Many microbial diseases in salmon aquaculture have emerged; one recently identified in Salish Sea fish farms is Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation (HSMI), a viral disease first seen in Norwegian fish-farms. If wild fish were to pick up HSMI they’d become too weak to make their way upstream to spawn. Yellow-mouth is a common bacterial disease which these salmon had recently been treated with antibiotics according to Cooke Aquaculture. Presumably all the drug treatments are timed so the fish are healthy at harvest time, about now, although Lummis say they saw yellow-mouth in the early Atlantics they caught.
Colonization of local rivers is a third major risk from escaped Atlantic salmon. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) maintains these nonnative fish can not establish breeding populations in the Pacific, citing surveys over the past few years that show none in local rivers. However University of Victoria and UBC scientists published a study in 2000 providing evidence for natural reproduction by Atlantic salmon in these waters. The absence of recent findings may have more to do with the fact that DFO isn’t looking much: it has reduced surveying of BC rivers by two thirds over the past few decades.
There are other issues, including what’s used to feed these captive fish, the waste generated, breeding programs, etc.
Why are there so many fish farms in the Salish Sea — both U.S. and Canadian waters — and why do they raise Atlantic salmon? Wild Atlantics are virtually gone from their native range, existing now as the preferred species in fish farms everywhere because the grow fast and are easier to manage in captivity. California and Alaska have prohibited open net-pen fish farms and Oregon has none, so our waters here are the focus for aquaculture companies.
Since the 1980s the salmon-farming business has exploded and now accounts for the vast majority of salmon eaten in the world — and salmon is now eaten more than any other kind of fish. In the US, 80% of the salmon we eat is farmed, most of it coming from foreign nations: since the late 1990s we've become a net importer of salmon. Norway and Chile produce more farmed fish than everyone else combined (comprehensive analysis, lots of great charts in this document from the International Union for Conservation of Nature). One effect of the huge quantity of farmed salmon is lower prices, which has carried over to the wild-salmon market, hurting the highly regulated commercial fishing industry, including the fish-based tribes, already under seige from dams, pollution, deforestation, urban development and changes in ocean conditions due to global warming and acidification. Even so, wild salmon are prized and consumers will pay more — although half the time they aren’t actually eating wild salmon, according to studies performed by Oceania, especially in restaurants.
Farmed fish are here to stay, in a world of an ever increasing human population needing ever more food. Compared to feedlot cattle, pig and chicken operations, fish are more economical to raise, requiring less feed per pound of animal. I don’t eat a lot of fish period, but when I do, I don’t eat farmed fish because 1) I worry about the environmental effects of fish farms, 2) I find them fatty, flabby and lacking the flavor of wild fish, and 3) I feel bad for these creatures living confined, helpless and subject to diseases, never knowing what it means to be a salmon. The jumping Atlantic salmon I see in the bay are lost and hungry, and don’t know what to do. But it’s a sad fact that the world needs food, and this is a way to meet that need, a better one in some ways than other livestock industries.
For now, the net-pen disaster has focused local public and political attention on the industry. Governor Inslee has mobilized an Incident Team of government agencies to look into it and has placed a moratorium on new fish farms in Washington waters, which affects Cooke’s plan to build a new one near Port Angeles. We’ll see how this unfolds, as political and economic factors wrestle for the future of net-farms in the open waters of the Salish Sea.
Saturday, Sep 2, 2017 · 1:45:36 AM +00:00 · OceanDiver
Atlantic salmon arrived in MacKaye Harbor today (around the corner from Aleck Bay) — a west-facing bay. Still lots of escapees in the waters of the San Juan Islands. This afternoon some local fishermen gill-netted a bunch there, gave the fish away to anyone who came by.