I just ran across this article: don't know if it is "proper" to post it here but it seems pertinent to the last few days dixcussions about Sea Lice and Salmon Farming and our steelhead and salmon stocks. Anyway, here it is: JUL 17, 2001 Fish Farms Spawn Trouble for Salmon Anglers By ALAN COWELL NVERCRERAN, Scotland � In the home of the Scottish salmon � a source of delights from the lox on the bagel to the saumon in the cro�te � is the king of fish in jeopardy? Surveying his ancestral lands below the Grampian Mountains, David Stewart thinks it most certainly is. For 700 years, he said, the Stewarts of Appin have commanded the same view here of lake and river, rich with salmon, whose genes carry them from birth in freshwater rivers to feeding grounds thousands of miles away at sea and then back to precisely the same spot to spawn. But the plight of the salmon has troubled these western Scottish lands as the numbers have dwindled. Ten years ago Mr. Stewart's annual angler's log showed that 47 wild Atlantic salmon were caught here. Last year the tally was down to two. This year, so far, it is one. He caught it, then released it, trying to preserve the salmon in the River Creran for one more generation. "We are on the edge now of the river's ability to restock itself," he said. Mr. Stewart represents one side of a bitter contest that pits environmentalists and anglers with rod and line against fish farming, the world's fastest-growing food business, accounting for most of the salmon and many other species on supermarket shelves and fishmongers' slabs. Although recreational fishing is an industry here too, the battle has been uneven. Farmed fish, grown by the tens of thousands in netted pens, doused with chemicals and fed with pellets that include medication and colorants, now outnumber caught wild fish by at least 300 to 1. And anglers say the farms are the prime source of parasites that kill off youthful wild salmon as they head out to sea. The duel has been sharpened by competing scientific evidence, buttressed by economic disputes over income and jobs and prolonged by the fish farming industry's long refusal to acknowledge any role in the decline of one of nature's great bounties. "Salmon aquaculture now constitutes a major threat to wild salmon stocks, if not the major threat," the wildlife protection organization known as the WWF said in a report in May. It was echoed in an assessment by the advocacy group Friends of the Earth in June: "Salmon farming is now seen as a real threat to the future of wild salmon." Only recently, fearful of undermining the wild salmon mystique that helps keep their prices up, some fish farmers have begun to say their adversaries may have a point. "I am quite happy to acknowledge that we are part of the matrix of factors" relating to the plight of wild salmon, said Lord Jamie Lindsay, chief of Scottish Quality Salmon, the main lobby group for the fish farming industry. "But we are probably a much smaller factor than some people ascribe to us." For some salmon stocks, the damage has already been done. In the United States, wild Atlantic salmon have been declared an endangered species in Maine, and environmentalists say the species is either extinct or threatened in two-thirds of the 2,000 rivers draining into the North Atlantic. Here and elsewhere, the wild salmon's numbers have been reduced by uncontrolled deep-sea and coastal netting, by pollution and by habitat changes caused by everything from global warming in feeding grounds off Greenland and Iceland to road building, dams and forestry projects that scarred its native rivers. But then came salmon farming, initially cast as a great step forward for human husbandry of the seas, and now a billion-dollar business stretching from Norway to Chile. Over 20 years, along the western coast of Scotland alone, 350 fish farms have spread their saltwater cages in or near river estuaries. Scottish fish farming has grown from a cottage industry to a $420 million annual business that earns more than beef and lamb farming combined and provides 1,300 jobs. In the same period, world production of farmed salmon has mushroomed from 5,500 tons a year to more than 660,000, according to the WWF: more than 140,000 tons from Scotland and the rest from countries including Norway and Ireland. David Rackham, the director of a major salmon farming company at South Shian near here, says fish farming produces a wholesome source of protein as well as profit, providing jobs and enhancing the food supply when fish stocks are under threat across the globe. "It's too easy to say that salmon farming is the reason that stocks of wild salmon have declined," he said. "The decline of salmon has been going on since the 1950's." But environmentalists see a more threatening shift in the way humans harvest the seas. "The king of fish has become a couch potato," said Don Staniford, author of the report by Friends of the Earth. "What we are seeing is a transition from fishing to farming. The wild Atlantic salmon as we know it is disappearing." Beyond those arguments, fisheries experts say, is another, possibly greater, ecological collision, not far away. Each pound of farmed salmon consumes pellets made from three pounds of sprats, sand eels, anchovies and pilchards. The supplies of those fish, hoovered from the oceans from Norway to Peru to South Africa, are finite, said Prof. Ronald W. Hardy of the University of Idaho. So in these times of human tinkering with the food chain, from genetically modified crops in the United States to the now-outlawed use of animal matter in animal feeds in Britain, it is only a matter of time before salmon, which are carnivores, are fed on vegetable protein, say fish farmers and other specialists. And some fish farmers say privately that genetic modification of salmon to maximize their growth is virtually inevitable as the demand increases. Compared with wild salmon, whose life can last eight years and cover thousands of miles, the farmed salmon's life is brief and restricted. Transferred from freshwater ponds to seawater tanks when they weigh only a few ounces, farmed salmon can grow in less than two years to around 10 pounds before they are harvested, pumped from seawater pens into ships, gutted, packed and sent on for smoking or other packaging. But there are hazards to wild fish. Sea lice, which occur naturally in small numbers, can proliferate on caged salmon, spreading into waters traversed each spring by young wild salmon as they make their journey to distant feeding grounds. Lice infestations can prove fatal, eating into the fins and heads of the young fish. The second problem is that when storms, or seals, damage the salmon pens and tens of thousands of the farmed salmon escape, they head upriver, challenging the wild fish for spawning partners and space. Malcolm Windsor, the secretary of the Edinburgh-based North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization, said the farmed salmon had "have been bred and interbred," with none of the wild salmon's survival instincts. And, he said, "You have to ask yourself: what is the impact of these releases? We are actually playing God." As such criticism has mounted, the fish farming industry has agreed to cooperate with operators of wild fisheries and with the Scottish authorities to curb sea lice infestations and prevent escapes and thus protect the industry's reputation � not, though, to the point of permitting random inspections of its sites. Meanwhile, though, Scotland's multimillion-dollar wild fishing business, in which anglers may pay $1,500 and more for a week's fishing, has suffered. "If the fish aren't around, the anglers don't come up," said Patrick Fotheringham, secretary of the Salmon and Trout Association, a group representing about 115,000 anglers like Mr. Stewart. "There was a time when west coast fisheries were the envy of the world and you couldn't get a place on them. Now you can't give them away." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! 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