Cooke Aquaculture’s salmon farm in Hermitage Bay, Newfoundland, has reported a fish loss to Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Between 2,000 to 3,000 salmon weighing between five and seven pounds escaped from a cage as the result of work carried out by divers, Cooke said in a press release. The escape occurred on 27 July, when two ropes came undone as net extensions were sewn onto a pen. That resulted in an opening in the pen forming, through which the salmon swam free.
According to company records, the cage contained approximately 75,000 salmon on 31 December, 2017.
Cooke’s Newfoundland subsidiary, Cold Ocean Salmon, is using DFO-approved gill nets to try to recapture the salmon. While this site has no presence of infectious salmon anemia (ISA), the disease had previously been found at several other Newfoundland aquaculture sites.
The Atlantic Salmon Federation has registered criticism of Cooke for taking four days to report the loss. ASF Coordinator of Community Outreach and Engagement Steve Sutton said the company only publicly acknowledged the escape after local residents began observing and reporting the loose salmon. Sutton told the CBC the reporting delay “raises the question of how many times have other escapes happened where nobody has seen anything.”
Sutton described attempts to recapture the escaped fish as “virtually impossible.”
“If fish didn’t move, they wouldn’t need to be in cages in the first place,” he said. “So those fish, most of them have dispersed to who knows where?”
In addition to spreading disease, Sutton’s concern with the escaped fish is the potential to “pollute the genetics” of wild salmon, which he said would harm a population already under threat. A 2016 DFO study showed that interbreeding could potentially be a problem. The study found that escaped farmed salmon had mated with wild salmon in 17 of 18 rivers surveyed on Newfoundland’s south coast.
Beyond those concerns, DFO says an aquaculture escape also creates increased competition for food. The DFO also noted that farmed salmon suffer high death rates in the wild because they don’t have the skills to avoid predators and have limited feeding abilities.
In August 2017, Cooke experienced a much larger escape when more than 250,000 Atlantic salmon swam free from one of its salmon pens near Cypress Island, Washington, U.S.A. That incident spurred the state's government to pass a law phasing out farming of Atlantic salmon by 2025.
Photo courtesy of CBC
