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• Monday, January 23, 2006 09:46 AM

  Farm Sea Lice Plague Wild Salmon

  As a British Columbian I am all too familiar with the damage being done to pacific wild salmon stocks by the introduction of their farmed atlantic cousins.

  Sea lice are crustacean parasites that can also affect fish. Both wild and farmed salmon are at risk. Scientists here studied 5,500 young wild pink and chum salmon over 37 miles of their migration route along the BC coastline. Juvenile salmon carried almost no sea lice prior to the farm but became heavily infected as they approached it. Infection levels reach over 70 times higher than normal.

  The impact of a single farm is far-reaching. Sea lice production is four orders of magnitude - 30,000 times - higher than natural. These lice then spread out around the farm.

  Sea lice can lower the fitness of salmon - and in some cases be lethal - as they create open lesions on the surface of the fish that compromises its ability to maintain its salt-water balance.

  When infection rates are high enough, the parasites feed on the fish at rates greater than the fish can feed itself, literally eating the fish alive. Young salmon are much more vulnerable due to their small size.

  In Alaska, where fish farms are banned, sea lice are not found to prey on juvenile pink salmon.

  The aquaculture problems in Canada’s Broughton Archipelago echo those in Norway, Ireland, and Scotland, where the environmental impacts of fish farming have led to large scale collapses of wild salmon populations.

  Some European countries use chemicals to control the parasites and dye to turn farmed salmon flesh pink. The use of those chemicals has led some environmentalists to hold demonstrations run ads urging consumers to boycott farmed salmon. Some grocery stores carry labels saying farmed fish contain dye. And a major study in the journal Science last year found more cancer-causing PCBs in farmed fish over wild fish.

  Please read FARMED SALMON - A DREAM TURNED NIGHTMARE by by Dr. Roderick O’Sullivan for more on how contaminated farmed salmon is.

  http://www.salmonfarmmonitor.org/osullivan.shtml

  —W Fleece
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