Loch Hope

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The real damage

Fish farms 'may spell the end of wild salmon'

By Auslan Cramb, Scotland Correspondent. Daily Telegraph - 4th June 2003

The scale of commercial fish farming enterprises in the west of Scotland is threatening to damage 10,000 years of evolution, a conference heard yesterday.

Jacque Robichaud, president of the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation, told an international conference in Edinburgh that fertile salmon had escaped from salmon farms and were interbreeding with wild stocks in many areas.

"We have an obligation to safeguard the interests of future generations. We must ensure that we avoid irreversible impacts," he told 150 delegates who will spend four days discussing ways to protect salmon stocks around the world.

Chris Poupard, head of the group of conservation charities at the meeting, added that 600,000 farmed salmon had escaped from sea cages in Norway alone last year.

He said: "Recent research carried out in Ireland has indicated that interbreeding between farmed and native wild fish can cause rapid and severe reductions in the fitness of the resultant progeny.

"This emphasises the dangers resulting from persistent escapes, even in comparatively small numbers, from sea cages."

In advance of the conference, the World Wildlife Fund released a report warning that wild salmon could disappear from Scottish waters unless governments took immediate action to tackle the threats posed by fish farming.

Salmon proprietors in the Highlands are particularly concerned that salmon and sea trout are also being killed by the large numbers of sea lice parasites that accumulate on farmed fish. Sea trout have almost disappeared in some rivers.

George Baxter, of WWF, said: "There's a lot of people who don't care and think these fish are not worth keeping.

"But if we continue down the road of having more and more fish farms with more and more fish feed, I think the writing is on the wall for wild fish, not just salmon but across the whole eco-marine system."

The WWF study said seven of the world's largest salmon producing countries had failed to fully implement the Oslo Resolution, which was signed in 1994 and designed to protect wild salmon.

Salmon farms 'do harm sea trout'

By Charles Clover, Environment Editor  Daily Telegraph - 4th September 2002

A direct link between the growth of salmon farms and the decline of the sea trout throughout the west coast of Scotland has been discovered by scientists for the first time.

Conservationists said the report had "handed the salmon farming industry a smoking gun".

The study was conducted by scientists from the Fisheries Research Service which has refused for more than a decade, in the teeth of circumstantial evidence, to make any direct causal link between the growth of salmon farming and the steep decline of the sea trout over 30 years.

Scientists from the Freshwater Laboratory studied the parasitic sea louse close to river mouths where sea trout congregate in the first few days after going to sea. They also sampled wild fish in the lower Shieldaig river.

They found a marked difference between the amount of sea lice present in Loch Torridon during the first year and the second year of the production cycle in local salmon farms. Two-year-old farmed salmon were shown to harbour massive infestations unlikely to occur in nature.

As a result, many of the sea trout which migrated to sea and became infested ran up their native rivers again, probably because sea lice fall off in fresh water. The breeding cycle is likely to have been disrupted if the trout were not actually killed by the parasites.

The report, presented yesterday at a meeting of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea in Copenhagen, concluded that the alternating presence of sea lice in Loch Torridon showed that they were not from wild fish but "of fish farm origin".

Previous research from 1996 indicated that most sea lice tended to stay within salmon farms and that lice at river mouths came from wild salmon and sea trout.

The research comes as Allan Wilson, the Scottish Deputy Environment Minister, is conducting a consultation on changes to the guidelines governing the location of fish farms in Scotland.

In Norway, rules bar salmon farms from within seven miles of the mouth of rivers and require them to be moved if concentrations of sea lice build up.

Helen Mclachan of WWF Scotland said: "This shows just how urgently the Scottish Executive's long awaited strategy for aquaculture, due to be produced in the next six months, has to push through radical reforms."