Dying Wild Juvenie Salmon Sea Lice Levels Twice Those Of Healthy Wild Fish

[hatrack]

Researchers say the discovery that listless, dying young salmon had more than twice the sea lice of healthy ones provides more direct evidence than ever before that sea lice from fish farms are killing salmon. "What it really represents in my mind is one more solid piece of evidence pointing to the fact that sea lice from fish farms kill young wild fish," Rick Routledge, Simon Fraser University researcher and member of the university's Centre for Coastal Studies, said on Sunday.

"To date, all we have had in terms of the ability of the lice to kill fish are data coming back from adult returns that show in the years where there were a lot of sea lice on the fish, the returns were very small," he said. Routledge and fish biologist Alexandra Morton, who co-authored a research paper on the issue, made their discovery about the number of sea lice on dying young fish when they looked at juvenile pink and chum in the Broughton Archipelago.

Routledge said the young fish are exposed to sea lice as they pass fish farms there on the way from spawning grounds out to sea. "Fish farms are crowded just like a human refugee camp and they are an ideal breeding ground for fish lice," he said.

Routledge and Morton co-authored a research paper on the issue for the Jan. 5 edition of The North American Journal of Fisheries Management.

EDIT

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=2d95b8f8-2aec-4bc9-8804-18279fdecac5

[Canuckistanian]

1. They've got to get rid of those fish farms.

Either that or rethink the whole farming system.

Last year, some genetically modified salmon escaped from their pens. Maybe it's too late already.

[Oerdin]

2. What would you prefer?

Wild stocks are callapsing from over fishing while people still need to eat and are going to eat. Currently humans are primative hunter gathers of the seas and just like farmers converted humans from hunter gathers into food producers the fish farmers can take the heat off of wild stocks in order to allow them to recover. Clearly, some policy changes are needed to more sustainablely farm fish but it can be done just as plants can be sustainablely farmed.

Currently to many fish are crowded into fish farms which are to small and they're feed to many antiboitics. Putting fewer fish into a given area will result in fewer "crowd" type paracites like fish lice and it will lessen the need to antiboitics. Dietary changes are needed so thei fish's diet more closely matchs the diet of wild fish (thus producing healthier fish and fish who have more omega 3 fatty acids). Only an ignorant person would demand the end to fish farming and leave the wild stocks to be systematically fished to extinction. We already know how to farm fish sustainablely we just need laws to make it happen.

[Canuckistanian]

3. I realize what you're saying is true

It's just that the current system of fish farming is just as great a danger to salmon stocks as overfishing at this present rate of expansion. The lice problem alone is starting to take a toll on wild salmon, as I've heard.

But, like everything that makes money, I don't think it will stop anytime soon, nor is it likely that the farms will be shut down.

And I don't buy the argument that "we need to eat". We're not a subsistence culture that depends on only a few available species. We don't need to eat salmon. And it' not exactly a staple at it's cost.

Fisheries here in Canada are shut down all the time, sometimes temporarily and sometimes for good, like the Eastern Cod. And I don't remember anyone saying that we couldn't feed our people.

Look, I realize that many people's jobs depend on this, but we can't let commercial interests ruin another natural resource. Then, NOBODY works.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Farmed fish eat too, you know...

Although farming salmon reduces the pressure on wild salmon slightly, those farmed fish need to eat... other fish. For every ton of farmed fish produced, about 4 or 5 tons of ocean fish will be trawled, minced and used as food: So it doesn't solve the over-fishing problem, it just moves it around.

(I'll try and dig a link out for the right amount)

There is a way around it - the Chinese farm carp purely for feeding other fish (carp are omnivores), but it hasn't caught on in the west. What the build up of toxins in this sytem is like is anyone's guess.

[hatrack]

5. How about limiting farmed fish to vegetarian species?

Farming carnivores like salmon and trout for meat (which depend on wild-caught protein for their feed) is like raising tigers for meat. Once the wild-caught stocks collapse, game over.