Salmon escape creates waves
A dislodged shackle caused a big tear in a net pen during harvesting of Atlantic salmon at one of Mainstream's farm sites near Tofino, B.C. last week. A number of five kilogram fish escaped from the net, causing environmental groups like the Friends of Clayoquot Sound to sound the alarm; "We desperately need to transition salmon farms into closed containment facilities so industry can operate more responsibly", said Dom Repta to the Times Colonist.
Meanwhile, Mainstream explains that none of the fish may have escaped the farm site due to a small-mesh predator net that encloses the entire farm. Salmon farmers in the Clayoquot Sound area have been plagued by sea lions in recent years, and many farms have gone to the installation of a new type of "predator net", which covers the entire net pen structure from top to bottom.
Historically, these predator nets have been made of large mesh nylon netting (8-10 inch square), but due to concerns about entanglement of sea lions in this type of webbing, fish farmers have recently begun to change their predator nets to smaller mesh netting- in this case nets of 2 inch square (5 cm x 5 cm) size.
Some 8,5 million Atlantic salmon have been deliberately released into B.C. waters in an attempt to establish this salmon for sport fishing enjoyment, and another two million have escaped from salmon farms in B.C. and Washington. There is no evidence of Atlantic salmon establishing viable populations anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. And Atlantic salmon can not interbreed with any of the five species of Pacific salmon.
