A mass die-off of salmon being farmed at Mowi Canada’s Northern Harvest Sea Farms facilities has resulted in the Department of Fisheries and Land Resources of Newfoundland and Labrador suspending 10 of its 47 farming licenses in the province.
The Friday, 11 October announcement by Department of Fisheries and Land Resources Minister Gerry Byrne came after the company Mowi Canada said it lost 2.6 million salmon, or about 5,000 metric tons worth of Atlantic salmon, due to high seawater temperatures resulting in low dissolved oxygen levels at its farms along the south coast of Newfoundland.
"I am suspending all affected Northern Harvest Seafood Farms licenses and issuing a directive that requires the company to continue the cleanup of the sites," Byrne said in an emailed statement, according to the CBC.
He said his department had found evidence of non-compliance with provincial laws governing aquaculture, and as a result would be altering the conditions of all of Mowi’s licenses for fish-farming in the province.
"I will be amending license conditions to all unaffected Northern Harvest Sea Farms and other associated Mowi license sites in the coming days," Byrne said.
Mowi said the die-off would cost it EUR 5 million (USD 5.5 million), which would be included in its third-quarter results. The loss was insured, the company added.
“The suspension will to our knowledge not impact our remaining operations in Newfoundland,” it said in a statement released by the company through the Norwegian Stock Exchange.
Byrne’s office was informed about the mass die-off in September but was prohibited from commenting publicly due to provincial laws, the CBC reported. Byrne has ordered the University of Newfoundland’s Marine Institute to conduct an investigation of the salmon deaths.
In a press conference on 11 October, officials from Mowi Canada and Northern Harvest Sea Farms said the clean-up was largely completed and it had hired MAMKA, a marine stewardship organization to continue monitoring the affected sites.
Mowi Canada claimed no salmon escaped from the pens during the mass mortality event, but Canada’s Globe and Mail reported Don Ivany of the Atlantic Salmon Federation said the pens were so weighted down with dead fish that it may have allowed some salmon to swim out of the tops of the cages.
The newspaper reported the shoreline near the affected pens was covered with a sticky, floating residue – most likely decomposing salmon flesh, in recent weeks. Jeffrey Hutchings, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University, said climate change could cause similar water temperature issues that contributed to this mass mortality event to happen again – and more often – in the near-future.
“I’d say to regulators, we need to think about the sustainability of such an industry in a warming climate,” he said. “It’s natural for fish to die, but it’s not natural for this amount of fish to die and in such a small area over a short period of time.”
In his emailed statement, Byrne said his department would look into changing its regulations to ensure the industry is properly regulated.
“Our government is committed to making the aquaculture industry safer and recently implemented new policies and procedures, including enacting strict policies to compel companies to disclose disease and all mortality events regardless of cause in a timely manner,” he wrote. “I want to reassure the people whose livelihoods depend on the aquaculture sector that we continue to focus on solutions that strengthen policies and practices to ensure public transparency is ever-present.”
Photo courtesy of Northern Harvest Sea Farms
