Chile’s National Fisheries and Aquaculture Service (Sernapesca) has confirmed the detection of ISA virus at the smolting tanks of local salmon farmer Marine Farm Tornagaleones’s Río Unión center and instructed the complete elimination of the fish under strict biosecurity protocols.
The culling will be of some 800,000 specimens at the center located in Puyuhuapi, in the Aysén Region, Cooperativa reported. Operations at the Marine Farm center had been suspended since 29 April, when the first cases of ISA were detected.
"We will expand inspections and surveillance to all surrounding centers for a daily update and to have information that enables us to make the fastest possible decisions if we are presented with evidence that could indicate the presence of the virus in other centers," Cristian Hudson, the regional director of Sernapesca, was quoted as saying.
For now, no other cases of ISA virus have been detected in the farms of other companies with operations on the Aysén coast, but authorities are tracing salmon that were sent from the Río Unión farm to the Tutil fattening center in the Los Lagos region.
Sernapesca has defined concession areas ACS 11 and 12A, which surrounding the Tutil center, as a surveillance zone and ordered increased sampling frequency. All the Atlantic salmon farming centers in the areas must carry out sampling within the next two weeks, and then monthly until an end to surveillance is declared, the Deputy Director of Aquaculture at Sernapesca, Marcela Lara, said in a release.
The Chilean authorities will continue to carry out surveillance actions to assess the situation in the area and verify compliance with biosecurity measures.
Marine Farm is a 100-percent Chilean-owned, vertically integrated company dedicated to the farming and sale of salmon and trout products.
Chilean salmon farmers reported three mass mortality events in April alone, one of which included Marine Farms. On 12 April, the company notified Sernapesca of the event at its Mellimoyu center, also in the Aysén region, with the presence of the cochlodinium algae leading to the death of 10,000 Atlantic salmon with an average weight of 4.3 kilograms.
Photo courtesy of Marine Farm
