The Living Oceans Society told that the call for closed contained salmon farms after incident of July 1 when about 30,000 Atlantic salmon escaped from a Marine Harvest Canada fish farm in Frederick Arm. These fish escape when one of the anchors holding the pens in place apparently slipped into deeper water causing the corner of the net cage to sink for an undetermined time.
The effort to recapture the escaped fish was futile and there was limited success. DFO’s Atlantic Salmon Watch Programme reported over 1.4 million Atlantic salmon escaped into B.C. waters between 1987 and 2002. Catherine Stewart, Living Oceans Society’s Salmon Farming Campaign Manager, said that the B.C. government can’t continue to put our wild salmon and marine ecosystem at risk by pretending that they are addressing the problems of open net cage salmon farming with tighter regulations.
The Society said that the closed containment systems can be that better mousetrap and it called on Minister Hagen and the provincial government to lead the way. Living Oceans Society and its allies in the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform (CAAR) are currently working with Marine Harvest Canada to develop an assessment tool that includes both environmental and economic considerations of a commercial scale closed containment pilot.
Stewart said that the Society already convinced Marine Harvest to join in asking the B.C. government to make a financial commitment to closed containment trials. She said that the problems include not just farmed salmon escapes, but also disease and pathogen transfer between wild and farmed fish populations, sea lice infestations of wild migrating juvenile salmon and untreated wastes from open net cage farms that are currently discharged directly into the marine environment.
