Salmon escape figures now available online

Representing some 95% of the tonnage of Scottish farmed salmon production, breaches of containment where fish are known to have escaped will now be reported monthly. This is a drastic change from the previous system, where the information had to be requested from the Scottish Executive, who would supply the incident reports within 40 days. Details of breaches of containment up until the end of March are now online on www.scottishsalmon.co.uk. The website will soon also be brought up to date, Hughes said. He added that salmon farmers had one month to file the information. In February, Lakeland Unst in Shetland had lost 8,213 salmon due to a hole in the net. At Marine Harvest in Scotsay 18,500 fish escaped in March after equipment failure led to a whole in the net. The January-March 2007 escaped fish correspond to less than 0.04% of the total amount of farmed salmon in Scottish waters during this period.