Eclipse tides blamed for big Cooke fish escape
Cooke Aquaculture has blamed “exceptionally high tides and currents coinciding with this week’s solar eclipse” for damage to a net pen that allowed thousands of Atlantic salmon to escape on the Pacific coast of America.
The firm estimates several thousand salmon escaped following “structural failure” of the pen, which was holding 305,000 fish.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) is urging the public to help recapture the fish, which were released into the waters between Anacortes and the San Juan Islands, Washington state.
The news has caused concern among tribal fishers, who call the accident “a devastation,” reported Seattle Times.
Cage imploded
Fish programme assistant director for the WDFW, Ron Warren, detailed the fish are about 10lbs (4.5kg) each. The net contained some 1,500 tons biomass but no one knows yet how many fish escaped when the net cage imploded.
Warren said the department has been monitoring the situation and crafting a spill-response plan with Cooke.
“It will not be possible to confirm exact numbers of fish losses until harvesting is completed and an inventory of fish in the pens has been conducted,” a source from Cooke pointed out.
The escape comes as the company is considering a controversial net-pen operation in the Strait of Juan de Fuca at Port Angeles, east of the Ediz Hook.
Warren stated that the WDFW agreed about that concern and that the department authorised commercial and tribal fishers to sell the Atlantic salmon specimens they catch.
Healthy and disease-free
“Catch as many as you want,” he said. “We don’t want anything competing with our natural populations. We have never seen a successful crossbreeding with Atlantic salmon, but we don’t want to test the theory.”
He said the fish were placed in the pens in May 2016 and treated for yellow mouth, a bacterial infection, in July 2016 and the fish that escaped are believed to be healthy and disease-free.
Cooke's explanation about the cause of the escape met with disbelief from fishermen and environmental groups.
But Nell Halse, vice president of communications for Cooke, was quoted in The Seattle Times as saying: “We did have very high tides and it was coinciding with the eclipse. Tides and currents and tidal surges in the last weeks have been very strong.
“Our people are out there every day and that is what they have been seeing. The tides were extremely high, the current 3.5 knots. People can believe it or not.”
She dismissed any environmental concern, saying the fish would not survive and that native fish were not at risk. “It’s primarily a business loss. The salmon will be food for the seals and the fishermen can enjoy them.”
Cooke was established in Canada in 1985 and has grown hugely by buying other companies. It has operations on both the east and west of the US and Canada, in South America and in Scotland, where it has 45 salmon farming sites in Orkney and Shetland.
