The Osprey: Removing San Clemente Dam Did More Than Restore Fish Passage
My one and only experience with Atlantic salmon was in September of 1992 with long-time friend Tom Pero, now Publisher at Wild River Press, and it was a magnificent experience. Tom and I flew to Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula and spent a week fishing the Meleze River, where I landed my first (and only) Atlantic salmon on a fly. I can assure you that its moniker Salmo salar “The Leaper” is well justified. It was a beautiful, bright fish and after admiring it for a moment, I let it slip back into that icy sub-arctic river. I believe that was the last wild Atlantic salmon I have seen.
Here on the West Coast, far from the Atlantic salmon’s native ocean, it is a very different story where farmed Atlantics are confined in net pens in Puget Sound off the Washington state coast, and along the coast of British Columbia as well.
Last summer, Atlantic salmon farming made headlines throughout the Pacific Northwest when as many as 160,000 of the fish escaped from a broken pen at Cypress Island in Puget Sound, which is owned by the Canadian aquaculture company Cooke Aquaculture Pacific.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
• SAN CLEMENTE DAM REMOVAL
• PEBBLE MINE PROPOSAL
• EELGRASS AS SALMON NURSERY
• PREMATURE SPAWNERS
• ATLANTIC SALMON FARMING
The escape set off alarms all along the coast as state officials worked to contain the escape while commercial and recreational fishers tried to capture as many of the at-large non-native salmon as possible. The escaped fish were found to have traveled as far south as the mouth of the Columbia River and north to Vancouver Island.
The initial concern was that the escaped fish would occupy native Pacific salmon and steelhead streams, but the real long-term threats from Atlantic salmon farming on the West Coast involve the spread of diseases and infecting wild salmon with sea lice that are known to be fatal to juvenile fish. And some recent research suggests that those problems may be even greater than previously thought.
For example, researchers at Simon Fraser University have found that juvenile wild Fraser River sockeye salmon that pick up heavy infestations of sea lice while passing though salmon farms eat less while they are in the ocean than uninfected fish, decreasing their growth and survival odds. In addition, a study by Chilean scientists has found that the vaccines given to farmed fish are not adequately protecting them from disease thereby making wild fish more vulnerable to outbreaks.
But on a positive note, last summer’s escape also prompted Washington state legislators to propose laws ending salmon farming in Puget Sound. Before the year is out we should know if those efforts have succeeded.