Birdsnest
Well-Known Member
salmonfarmscience
Your fish farms have lost 900,000 fish to disease from 3 farms this season alone on our coast plus another huge loss in Washington State.
This particular disease came to your Atlantic salmon from our Pacific Salmon, who have developed somewhat of a immunity to the virus.
Is there a solution to these HUGE losses other than ensuring Atlantic salmon do not come into contact with Pacific Wild Salmon, or are these losses going to simply continue until all our wild salmon are gone!
I do believe the Science as you like to call it says Sockeye Smoltz coming into a concentration or contaminated area of this particular virus are subject to death.
Another concern is your Fish Farms run lights all night to speed growth while Smoltz of all wild species pass by. Your people say your Atlantic salmon eat pellets and would not eat these Smoltz if they were attracted to the lights...right? What Science do you have to prove this, particularly when Atlantics have escaped and have been caught we have found bait fish in their bellies?
The evidence goes on and on why fish farms and wild salmon do not mix.
Just look at the track record all over the world.
This is just a short off the cuff reaction to your posts.
If you want to feed the world with salmon, do it on dry land ensuring your effluence is clean when it goes into the environment....which is another HUGE problem you have yet to reslove both from your farms AND from the plants where you import your eggs and raise them thru the smolt stage!
You will have a tough time convincing many people on this form that Fish Farms belong in our Pacific Coast waters and have NO NEGATIVE IMPACT on our wild stock or our environment...why.....because any claims like to this effect are simply a lie!!
As cuttlefish points out. Statements should be made with something backing them.
About the lights:
http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2007/dfo-mpo/Fs97-4-2662E.pdf
The potential for predation by caged Atlantic salmon on wild food organisms has
raised concerns about the possible impacts on local populations of wild fish species in
the vicinity of fish farms. The use of bright lights on some sites had raised specific
concerns that wild species of fish and zooplankton were being attracted to the lights and
were then being consumed by the captive salmon. We collected and examined
stomachs from Atlantic salmon reared at four different aquaculture sites on the northern
end of Vancouver Island. One site used large lights as a technique to enhance growth.
We examined a total of 600 stomachs from all sites collected over a 9-week period. We
collected another 134 stomachs from an experimental aquaculture site near the Pacific
Biological Station, Nanaimo. Most gut contents were contained within caecae, in
various states of digestion. The gut contents varied in time and within and among pens
but very little wild feed was taken by salmon at any of the sites. The main wild
organisms consumed were caprellids, small crustaceans that are part of the ‘fouling’
community that grows on the webbing of nets on the cages where the fish are held.
There were some wild pelagic organisms such as copepods and euphausiids but these
were rare. Only one fish was found in the stomachs, a small sand lance (Ammodytes
hexapterus). No fish larvae were found in the stomachs but very small items, such as
larvae of marine fish such as herring (Clupea pallasi) or eulachons (Thaleichthys
pacificus) might have gone undetected because after a short time in the stomachs, the
fragile tissue in fish larvae would have been unrecognizable. It is probable, however,
that if substantial numbers of fish larvae had been consumed, we would have detected
some. There were no obvious differences in the consumption of wild organisms among
the sites and lights had no apparent effect on the consumption of wild food.