Yet another B.C. aquaculture case goes to court
Opinion
Every fish farmer in British Columbia has seen some type of fish from the wild swim in and out of net pens holding farmed salmon. For example, it is not unusual to see a few Herring swimming along the walls of a net holding 10-20 Kg Atlantic salmon brood stock. But has anyone ever seen an Atlantic salmon chasing a Herring or a Pile Perch instead of a feed pellet?
When salmon is harvested at a farm site it is almost always done by the use of a fish pump of one sort or another. It could be a locally made airlift pump or a sophisticated, dual-chamber pump from a factory at the other end of the world. The pumps are designed to deliver the fish to a stunning device in order to render the fish unconscious in preparation for slaughter. What these pumps have in common is a dewatering device, so that the fish enters the stunning apparatus without being submerged in seawater. The dewatering device may be made from different designs, but mostly it involves a plastic pipe or channel made of aluminum or stainless steel, perforated with large slots or holes to let the water out. This would also allow any occasional, inadvertently sucked up small fish to escape back into the wild.
The only time any juvenile salmon or other small fish could be mixed up with the farmed salmon in a transport vessel is if the small farmed fish had been in a net pen in the sea for some time, and then pumped out of the pen and into a transport vessel in order to be moved to a different grow-out site. In this case all of the fish in the transport vessel should have been kept alive. In this court case, however it is alleged that the transfer took place between a vessel docked at a harbour, and a land-based transport vessel. The discussion centers around a principle rather than an environmental catastrophe- millions of pink salmon returned to the area where these farmed fish came from last year, and the losses of juvenile wild pink salmon are perhaps in the hundreds. Given normal survival rates, these small fish may have produced a dozen or so 1-3 Kg salmon on their return from the open ocean a year and a half later.
So now a never-tiring anti-salmon farming activist in B.C. has taken upon herself to alert the authorities to the fact that apparently some juvenile pink salmon were inadvertently taken from the ocean in connection with the movement of Atlantic salmon that were dewatered on land, such that any small wild fish would be deposited on dry land instead of back into the ocean. Accusations have also been made that sometimes herring has inadvertently been taken out of the ocean in connection with the harvesting of farmed fish. The Canadian Justice Department will pursue these charges, with Marine Harvest scheduled to appear in court on June 22.
Commenting to Globe & Mail reporter Mark Hume, Environmental Relations Director for Marine Harvest Canada Mr. Clare Backman said wild fish do pass through farm pens at times, but farmers always try to exclude them when harvesting their stock. He said a number of industry studies over the past 25 years show that wild fish “have not been subjected to any harm” from mingling with farmed fish.
