Spawning Environmental Worries

by Kristan Hutchison, Juneau Empire
Reprinted with permission of The Juneau Empire

Fall, 1998 -- The fishing was good, but the salmon were bad.

Tourists casting lines for salmon near Puerto Cisnes in southern Chile reeled in thin fish with flaking scales last April. So did scientists studying the impacts of the foreign species on native fish.

``We did catch some very weird fish,'' said Chilean scientist Doris Soto.

She suspected the Atlantic salmon came from a nearby salmon farm, where fish are raised in floating pens for export. The farm was suffering from epidemic diseases and Chilean environmentalists accused the farmer of releasing the sick fish so he wouldn't have to dispose of the carcasses.

Salmon farmers don't usually release fish on purpose, an act akin to store owners dumping their goods in the street. But wherever there are salmon farms there are escapes, sometimes just a few salmon slipping away, occasionally the whole school breaking out when a hungry sea lion rips open the net or a storm breaks the line.

Inside the net or out, the relatively young salmon farming industry raises a slew of environmental issues. Escaped salmon might spawn and compete with local sealife. Salmon farmers sometimes kill or scare off marine mammals to protect their fish. Food pellets and feces can pollute the area below salmon farms. Sick fish, like those released in Puerto Cisnes, can spread disease.

Fish farmers, scientists and governments are working to solve environmental problems through better practices, new technology and stricter regulation. They admit they made mistakes when the industry was new, but they've learned more about where to put fish farms and how to run them.

``One of the problems with the industry is private development is far ahead of government control,'' said Gert van Santen, a senior fisheries specialist at World Bank in Washington, D.C. ``With aquaculture you have to be on top from the very beginning. An unregulated aquaculture industry is dangerous.''

Escape and go wild

Fishermen in Southeast Alaska caught about 400 escaped Atlantic salmon from 1994 to 1998, including some in Lynn Canal, north of Juneau. As many as 3,000 escaped Atlantics may swim to Alaska undetected each year, estimates the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

The Atlantic salmon come from fish farms in Washington state and British Columbia, where at least 790,660 salmon escaped from farms since 1991. The true number is higher, because farmers don't always report escaped fish, said B.C. fisheries biologist Andy Thompson.

One worry is escaped farmed salmon might help contribute to the demise of native wild fish, which are already jeopardized by other causes.

Environmentalists fear stocks of Pacific salmon are so weak they cannot compete against a new species for the same food and spawning grounds. In Washington and Oregon, nine subspecies of salmon are already listed as endangered. The B.C. fishing fleet remained docked last season to try to revive depleted salmon runs.

Scientists in general are not concerned, saying the worries are unrealistic.

Historically, Atlantic salmon performed poorly outside their native spawning grounds along the North Atlantic Ocean. Earlier attempts to start runs of Atlantic salmon in British Columbia and Chile by planting millions of eggs and juvenile salmon in the rivers failed, leaving biologists to wonder whether the East Coast salmon could even spawn out west.

They can, as biologists discovered last summer when several spawned Atlantics were found in a B.C. river. There are still questions of whether juvenile Atlantic salmon will survive to maturity, or establish runs of substantial size, said Don Noakes, fishery station director in Nanaimo, B.C.

Farmed salmon have established runs in Southern Chile, where all salmon are foreigners, said scientist Doris Soto. For three years fly-fishermen have visited the rivers in southern Chile in March and April to catch fall salmon runs, said Chilean fishing guide Mireya Bilbao.

Soto is worried the new runs of salmon will hurt Chile's 250 native fish species, but it's not the Atlantics causing the problem. Though 58 percent of the salmon raised in Chile are Atlantics, it's the relatively smaller numbers of farmed Pacific salmon, both coho and chinook, that seem to be establishing wild runs and competing with native fish for food.

``They are very large chinook and very large runs,'' Soto said. ``They feed on almost everything - from plastic yogurt cans to fish to zooplankton.''

Chile's experience could reassure Northwesterners wondering whether Atlantic salmon will compete with the native Pacific salmon. When Atlantics escape they tend to stay near the pen, eating food pellets that drift outside, said Chilean scientist Carlos Molinet.

About 95 percent of the Atlantic salmon caught in Washington, British Columbia and Alaska had empty stomachs, said B.C. biologist Andy Thompson, who dissects the escapees. He said the empty stomachs indicate many farmed Atlantics don't forage.

``They're domesticated, vaccinated, dopey fish that grow,'' said Terry Nielsen, a fish farmer in Tofino, B.C. ``They are like the cows of the sea.''

The scientific community is not concerned that Atlantics could hurt the native Pacific salmon, said Mike Rust, a biologist in Seattle working to bring back Washington's endangered salmon.

``If you take a step back, fish farming for the most part allows wild stocks to survive,'' said Rust, who would rather see fish farming than over-fishing, ``and I say that as someone who's working to save the most endangered species.''

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game disagrees. Atlantic salmon can survive a year without eating and their offspring could be better suited to compete against wild salmon, said a Fish and Game paper released this spring urging the B.C. government to phase out fish farming.

Farmed Atlantic salmon may be a bigger threat in their home waters, on the East Coast. Like cows interbreeding with buffalo, farmed Atlantics could spawn with wild Atlantics and diminish the gene pool, said Fred Whoriskey, vice-president of the Atlantic Salmon Federation.

If it were a few farmed fish marrying into a huge family of wild ones it wouldn't matter, but the odds are against wild salmon on the East Coast. More farmed Atlantics than wild swim up New Brunswick's Magaguadavic River to spawn, once one of the most important salmon runs in Canada, said Whoriskey. He is trying to re-establish the wild runs by trapping salmon as they go upstream and weeding out the farmed fish.

``I liken it to an infantry battle,'' he said. ``What's going to have to happen is a reclaiming of the river system, inch by inch.''

Protecting the flock

Salmon farmers want the same thing Whoriskey does - to keep their salmon in the cages. Every escaped fish is a business loss, which is why farmers pack guns.

Like farmers on land protecting their herds from wolves, some fish farmers shoot sea lions that come looking for an easy meal. A colony of 700 sea lions in a Chilean national park was decimated after a salmon farm moved within about 400 yards of it. Now only about 25 sea lions are left.

Seal rookeries in British Columbia were also wiped out, said Alexandra Morton, a B.C. whale biologist on Vancouver Island's Inside Passage.

Morton became an outspoken opponent of salmon farms in 1993, when she noticed they were scaring away the humpback, minke, gray and killer whales she'd been studying since 1984. The farmers were using underwater noisemakers to ward off predators, but the sound kept the whales from their feeding grounds as well.

A Canadian government study found harbor porpoises also avoid the noise and there is some evidence herring, wild salmon and other fish may be impacted.

``They sound like crickets, but they're a decibel level comparable to standing behind a jet engine,'' Morton said. ``They work by causing pain in seals' ears.''

A year ago the salmon farms near Morton's home and research station agreed to turn off the noisemakers and since then some of the whales returned, she said.

The B.C. fisheries lab in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, may have a better solution to predators. Scientists there began tossing dead fish to a seal when she came to visit. The ``pet'' seal in turn claimed the site as her territory, driving off other seals.

``Keeping one seal happy keeps away others,'' said Leslie Lewington, a fishery technician.

Few farms are likely to adopt predators though. More standard is a second net hung a few feet outside the regular net to hold predators at bay. The predator nets are effective unless a strong current pushes the outer net against the inner net, allowing sea lions to snatch bites of the trapped fish.

New pen designs may be even more effective. Some hold the net taut so it cannot be moved by currents. Others screen off the pen so predators won't see the fish.

The public toilet

Better nets might reduce the number of escaping salmon, but even penned salmon hurt the habitat, say environmental groups. Salmon dung and food pellets drift down, covering the seafloor faster than they can decompose.

About 80 percent of the salmon feed stays in the water, either as uneaten pellets or sewage, said Chilean scientist Doris Soto, who studied the impact of salmon farms on Chilean lakes for nine years. Though fish farmers try to feed more efficiently, there will always be some waste.

The waste is natural and the water can handle it, countered Canadian fish farm consultant Dave Conley.

``Fish poop in the sea. That's where they live,'' he said.

Environmentalists say the difference is numbers. Salmon farms often have 180,000 to 250,000 fish at one site. Wild salmon don't stay in one place in such high densities, said Arthur Whitely, a founding member of the Marine Environmental Consortium in Seattle. The consortium convinced the Environmental Protection Agency to require waste permits for fish farms.

At first, waste from a fish farm increases the amount of marine life below, as mollusks, crustaceans and other fish feed on the nutritious sediment. Studies found that as the sediment builds up, the number of animals below the nets increases, but the diversity diminishes until there are just hordes of worms, bacteria and fungi.

Rotating salmon farm sites, the way other farmers rotate their crops, allows the sea bottom to recover. Even the most heavily sedimented sites return to their natural state if not used for five years, said Marcel Gijssen, a spokesman for the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association.

Some environmentalists believe letting the site lie fallow is not a complete solution, because fish farm waste also contains antibiotics, artificial pigments and other contaminants not produced by wild fish. A 1997 Canadian government study found elevated levels of zinc in sediment samples and 38 percent of the samples tested were toxic to tiny crustaceans.

Because the cages are in the water, the fish feed and feces are blown about by currents and can land on beaches 100 to 165 feet away, according to the Canadian study. Other marine animals and seabirds eat the excess farm feed and feces, bringing any contaminants into the food chain, which sometimes ends with people.

``You can't make predictions from looking down from the sky where the silt's going to settle, where the sh--'s going to land,'' said Julie Edwards, who works for the Kwakiutl Territorial Fisheries Commission on Vancouver Island.

Sometimes it lands on traditional clam beds. The Kwakiutl Kwakewith Natives in British Columbia are afraid to eat clams from beaches near the salmon farms because they believe there are chemicals and hormones in the sediment, said Pat Alfred, president of their fisheries commission. Native fisheries guardian Arthur Bick has watched the streams and clam beaches he surveys change.

``Everywhere I've dug clams, there's a fish farm in the vicinity. Now the clams aren't there as much as they used to be,'' said Bick, who's been digging clams for 15 years to feed himself and five sisters. ``The clams, they become mushy. They're not firm anymore. They're more liquid. They don't taste so good.''

In response, fish farmers point out they have been switching from antibiotics to vaccines, developing natural alternatives to laboratory-made pigments, and using sensors to judge when the fish are full so there will be less food waste. In Chile, they're even trying to breed fish that produce less waste, said Eugenio Larrain of Fundacion Chile, which oversees fish farms in the South American nation.

Efficiency can only go so far though. Even if nothing artificial was put in the fish feed, it would still add nitrogen and phosphorous to the water, disrupting the natural balance, Soto said.

But she tries to keep the waste and feed from salmon farms in perspective. In the lakes Soto has studied, salmon farms were responsible for 13 to 15 percent of the change in water quality. Erosion, logging and sewage from nearby towns had a much larger impact.

The contamination from salmon farms can be managed, Soto said. Her husband, also a biologist, is creating artificial habitats around salmon cages using clams to filter the wastes.

Other scientists used seaweed, mussels and sea cucumbers to do the same thing.

``It's a clean way of doing things because you are emulating the environment,'' said Chilean professor Alfredo Klempau.

Often other species grow faster near the salmon farm, so it may be both environmentally and economically beneficial to farm species together, said Chilean scientist Carlos Molinet.

Sicker than a dogfish

Like any animal kept in high densities, from commercially raised poultry in buildings to toddlers in a child-care center, farmed salmon get sick more than their wild cousins. Fishermen worry farmed fish will bring in new diseases and spread them to the wild fish.

More often contagions already present in the native fish become epidemic among the farmed fish, because they live closer together. When infectious salmon anemia shut down a quarter of the salmon farming industry in New Brunswick and Scotland, people worried it would spread into the native fish. Then fisheries biologists discovered the native fish had always been carrying the fish disease, but didn't get sick.

Sometimes foreign diseases are brought in with farmed salmon or salmon eggs, so native fish have no immunities. A parasite imported with Baltic salmon spread into 23 Norwegian rivers since 1981, forcing Norway to kill all the fish and restock the rivers.

Initially fish farmers fought diseases with antibiotics, some of them the same drugs used to treat people. This led to fears that disease-causing microorganisms would build up resistance to the antibiotics, making it difficult to treat ill fish. An antibiotic-resistant salmon disease did appear in Europe in 1992. Researchers responded by developing a vaccine, which prompts the fish to develop a natural immunity to a specific disease.

Now vaccines prevent most common salmon ailments in Norway. Antibiotic use there dropped from 60 percent of the farms in the 1980s to 2.3 percent in 1994. Along the way, Norwegian salmon farmers saved money and fish.

Chileans would like to follow Norway's example, but until this year they didn't have vaccines for their most widespread fish diseases. Last year Chilean salmon farmers used almost 90 tons of antibiotics compared to one ton used by the Norwegians, said Jorge Uribe, manager of a salmon farm on Chiloe Island in Chile.

Use of antibiotics in Chile is expected to drop this year with the introduction of a vaccine for one of their most common fish diseases, ricketsia, said Marcia House, an American microbiologist conducting research there.

Fish farmers are also finding other ways to prevent diseases. They use Atlantic salmon adapted to living close together in a pen and leave farm sites empty for six months to clean out viruses or parasites, among other measures.

``This is what we want,'' Uribe said. ``To produce a product more environmentally.''

Keeping it clean

Better pens, better practices and other innovations could all make the salmon-farming industry environmentally safe, say scientists and fish farmers.

While environmentalists fight fish farms in the Pacific Northwest, they've allied with fish farmers in Chile. Realizing the importance of clean water, the Chilean salmon farmers are helping fight logging and development that might pollute the water. Standards differ from company to company, but microbiologist House was impressed by the salmon farms she visited in Chile.

``The people are really taking care of their facilities,'' House said. ``The sites are always clean and the water is always clear.''

The industry is subjected to stronger regulations than in its early years and has also improved voluntarily. In Maine, salmon farmers are moving toward a crop rotation system, where a site would be left to sit empty for a year and recover, among other measures, said Joe McGonigle, head of the Maine Salmon Farmers Association.

But many environmentalists see one final answer for fish farms - get them out of the water. If salmon were raised in pools on land the fish couldn't escape and the sewage could be treated.

``It's not cheap,'' said Arthur Whitely in Seattle, ``but our environment isn't cheap either. They just use the public bathroom at no cost to them.''

The requirement to move to land would just drive the industry to Chile and other countries where environmental regulations aren't as stringent, said fisheries economist James Anderson in Virginia.

Salmon farmers in British Columbia and Washington are trying to engineer their way out of the political stalemate. They are developing newer, stronger pens that can be used in the open ocean further off shore and can capture the fish waste.

Given a chance, they may succeed. Future SEA Farms Inc. grows salmon in impermeable floating bags that protect them from fatal algae blooms and predators, said Craig Williams, president of the B.C. company. With the bag system, fish waste can also be collected for use as fertilizer.

Ocean Spar Technologies in Washington State created ``floating fenceposts,'' 50-foot cement buoys that hold net cages taut, allowing the cages to be used in faster currents, far from shore and view.

``We've been studying this issue and researching it for so long that we're basically convinced we can solve virtually all of the problems that have been displayed in Washington and B.C.,'' said Gary Loverich, owner and chief engineer of Ocean Spar.

Fish farmers will naturally adopt technology that saves them money or increases profits, but otherwise hesitate to buy costly new equipment. It may be left to governments to require changes that protect the environment.

``In our integrity as coastal people, whether you're Native or non-Native, if you're thinking about living off natural resources, you better be thinking about the future,'' said Native fisheries expert Julie Edwards in B.C.

Copyright © 2007 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.