Upon receiving laboratory results, Chile’s national fisheries and aquaculture service Sernapesca has confirmed a case of ISA virus at local salmon farmer Granja Marina Tornagaleones’s Caucacura center, located on the island of Chiloé in the Los Lagos region.
In response, Sernapesca has established a surveillance area that covers the concession groups at Caucacura and its neighboring sector, asking the companies located in the area to take extreme biosecurity measures. To date, no new positive cases of ISA virus have been detected in the area.
For its part, Granja Marina Tornagaleones has presented the harvest plan as required by established regulations, and is set to begin harvesting the cage that tested positive.
The event marks the second time this year that Sernapesca has detected the ISA virus at Marine Farm Tornagaleones’s operations. In May, the virus was confirmed in the smolting tanks of the company’s Río Unión center in Puyuhuapi, in the Aysén region, with the subsequent culling of some 800,000 specimens at the center.
In similar, but not related, news to the aforementioned incident, Sernapesca reported that it had notified Cultivos Yadran of suspected ISA virus at the company’s Melchor 719 farming center, located in the Norte area in the Aysén region.
Chile’s fisheries and aquaculture service said that it has implemented all the preventive surveillance and control measures as called for in the official guidelines, and that it will strengthen surveillance to monitor the area's production centers.
Puerto Montt-based salmon farmer Yadran saw record-high harvests in 2019 of 28,053 metric tons (MT), of which 25,813 MT were exported. It aims to produce 30,000 MT by 2021.
