An embuggerance: In ecology, you can’t do only one thing. Open-water salmon farms are harbouring the parasites that will infect wild salmon on the B.C. coast and kill them off within about four years, according to researchers at the University of Alberta.
Intensive farming of salmon for American dinner plates is threatening some wild salmon populations with imminent extinction, according to the most detailed study ever done of the contentious issue. The report comes as the federal government and the aquaculture industry are pushing hard for a major expansion of fish farming in coastal areas.
The new research found a direct connection between the rapid growth of fish farming in the waters of the Broughton Archipelago off British Columbia and the abrupt decline of the region’s wild pink salmon. What linked the two, the researchers found, were widespread infestations in the open-net salmon pens by sea lice. Older salmon easily tolerate the parasite, but young ones migrating through the same waters do not.
“These young salmon wouldn’t be dying if it wasn’t for the salmon farms and all those sea lice,” said lead author Martin Krkosek, a fisheries ecologist at the University of Alberta. “The wild population is dropping so fast that there isn’t much time left to act.”
But we’re studying it. The study should be finished in about five years. As someone said: when it comes to global warming and the ecology, we don’t have a test tube; we’re in the test tube!
