SALMON PARADOX
For years, anglers have blamed fish farms for the declines in native stocks. But, argues an industry insider, the producers are working hard to raise standards and using their expertise to help boost wild fish numbers. So are these unlikely partnerships key to the future of Scotland’s king of fish?
YOU never forget your first time. Mine was April 12, 1981 and I was just 13. I know that because we had just crowded round a small telly in the bunkhouse to watch the first Space Shuttle blast off from Florida before we headed to the banks of the Findhorn.
It was unusually hot and still. The glorious bright spring sunshine was cutting straight through the water, bouncing back shimmers of brown and gold from the slime-covered stones on the river bed.
I had been given a spinning rod to keep me out of trouble and told to head off to the rough water, leaving the experts with proper salmon gear free to tease out the fish lurking in the pool off to my left.
But then my rod bent sharply towards the water, the grip bucking and pulling in my hand before the salmon shot off up river, taking my line with it which screamed out of the reel as I held on, with no idea what to do next.
After just a few seconds, the fish was gone. It hadn’t been hooked. But I had.
Since then I have fished in most of Scotland’s most celebrated salmon rivers: the Tay and the Spey, the Dee and the Tummel, the North Esk and the Conon and, the river now closest to my heart, the Tweed, which I can see – almost – from my back garden.
I’d like to say that I’m a regular, that I know my favoured beats intimately and I’m an expert salmon angler.
But I’m nothing of the sort. I don’t spend my days avidly planning my next salmon fishing trip and, really, I’m lucky if I cast a salmon fly over the top of a slow-flowing pool even just once a year.
That’s because, for me – like for so many other casual anglers – salmon fishing has lost its lustre. There are so few fish now that the idea of thrashing the water for days on end with only the slimmest hope of actually hooking anything is not the attraction it once was.
IwOUlD rather chase wild brown trout in a Highland loch or even scout for big pollock on the open sea than spend hours fruitlessly working a salmon pool, knowing my chances of success are pretty much close to zero.
But it wasn’t always like this. look back at those black-andwhite pictures from the mid part of last century. Ghillies and boatmen, in tweeds and ties, posing behind rows and rows of salmon. A day’s catch, lined up, would cover the entire bank.
And that is the crucial point. we, as anglers, have to acknowledge the role we (and particularly our forebears) played in eroding stocks of the so-called ‘king of fish’.
Since 1952, when the first proper records were put together, and the mid 1990s, when catch and release started to take effect, anglers have been taking and killing between 50,000 and 100,000 salmon from Scotland’s rivers – each and every year.
But what no one seemed to realise – or, if they realise it, they didn’t admit it – was that we were killing the crucial brood stock which was needed to keep the species thriving.
The very fish that were heading up river to spawn were being hoiked out of the water and killed in their thousands.
Even today, salmon anglers are killing fish. last year, despite the well reported crisis in salmon stocks, anglers killed 2,475 salmon and 1,424 sea trout on Scotland’s rivers.
These are just the ones we know about and there are always the tales of one or two others that seem to slip through for the pot with a nod and a wink.
This brings us to the heart of this debate. Some of the more vociferous, obstinate and unreasonable voices on the angling side are in complete denial about their own culpability while obsessing about an ‘enemy’ they can blame: salmon farmers.
‘It’s salmon farms, it’s salmon farms, it’s salmon farms,’ they say, as if by repeating this mantra and not examining the evidence they can make it real. I even get this from friends on the banks of the Tweed. ‘Oh, it’s salmon farms,’ they say, somehow forgetting that there are 500 miles of open sea between the mouth of the Tweed and the nearest pen.
NOw, that’s not to say that salmon farming is not part of this debate. Salmon farms can pose a potential hazard to wild fish. Studies suggest that sea lice from farms could be responsible for the loss of one or two out of every 100 wild salmon that leave our rivers.
Yet there are some anglers who are so blinkered and so inflexible, they blame fish farms first, last and every time
the decline in wild stocks is raised, when it would make much more sense to seek out the reasons why the other 98 salmon are not returning and look for ways of remedying those issues first.
Ah, but let’s control the controllables, they say – a coded call to stop salmon farming because it is something we can do, rather than tackle issues which we don’t yet know how to confront.
But that’s like saying: one in a hundred road accidents is caused by someone stepping out into the road while staring at a mobile phone so, rather than tackle road accidents as a whole, let’s just ban mobile phones.
So what other factors are there?
we know that salmon are affected, significantly, by climate change, not just because it pushes them into different parts of the ocean but because it leaves them less to eat and weak fish are at a much higher risk of disease and infection.
we know they face increased competition from pelagic fish for diminishing food supplies.
And then, when salmon eat too much herring and sprat – again a skewing of the marine ecology is a likely side effect of climate change – they can suffer from a deficiency of the vitamin thiamine which makes them unable to reproduce.
We know we have been polluting our rivers with antibiotics and drugs and insecticides and hormones for years, that pine plantations along the banks increase acidity and that hydro projects make it hard – even impossible – for salmon to return to their spawning grounds.
We know goosanders and cormorants feast on young fish and there are anecdotal tales of seals acting ‘like U-boat packs’ at the mouths of rivers, waiting for the tide to turn then flopping off into the water, ready to form a predatory line right across the river. Then, when they are sated with fish, they give way to a second wave of seals who follow them into the water.
No one knows how many wild salmon we lose to seals every year. There are about 186,000 grey seals and 20,000 common seals around Scotland’s coast, and each one is on the lookout for fish to eat.
And what we do know is that, despite millions of pounds spent on preventative measures, salmon farmers lose about 250,000 fish a year in seal attacks.
As the farmed sector gets better at defending itself against these predators – putting in strong new nets on bigger and tougher pens – so the seals have to find their meals elsewhere, with returning wild salmon likely to be a very attractive alternative.
But knowing what is responsible for our declining salmon stocks is only half the answer.
THe really big issue is what we do to make things better and we could do worse than turn our focus to the River Lochy on the West Coast – right in the middle of the so-called ‘aquaculture sector’, where the fish farms are.
Jon Gibb is the fishery manager of the Lochy and, for the past 20 years, he has been running a hatchery on the river, using indigenous fish as the brood stock and growing salmon until they are big enough to enter the river.
He has had some success. In 1998 the rod catch on the Lochy was 32. In 2007 it was 1,600. Despite this,
Mr Gibb has had to cope with big up/down cycles: one year the returns to the river would be great, the next year they wouldn’t.
To help solve this problem, Mr Gibb approached Marine Harvest, Scotland’s biggest salmon farmer (now Mowi) and they started working together.
The salmon farmers had the expertise. Having worked for years at maximising survival rates of salmon, Marine Harvest helped Mr Gibb do the same for his river.
He now uses a range of different methods to help boost numbers on the Lochy. Many of these involve help from the salmon farmers and from salmon feed companies too, and his latest project involves growing wild salmon from the river in Mowi’s pens until they are big enough to release into the river and spawn naturally.
Talking about his approach, he said recently: ‘In the early days of fish farming, the industry was not as regulated as it is today.
‘Back in the 1990s, I would have agreed that the biggest factor affecting wild salmon was the rising levels of sea lice and escapes from fish farms.
‘But, in 2019, the industry is far better regulated and the local wild fish interests and the aquaculture companies work with one another and not against one another.’
This sort of project is not going to work everywhere but it is exactly the sort of collaborative relationship that has to be the future: salmon farmers and fishery managers working together, sharing knowledge and finding common cause to improve salmon numbers in our rivers.
Having come from an angling background, I know, like and respect many of those who love to fish our rivers. It pains me that some of these people now see me as a traitor for deigning to work for the farmed salmon sector.
But, to me, there is no contradiction. The salmon is Scotland, whether it is a fish pulled from a fast-flowing river on a single fly or whether it is farmed, smoked, packaged and sold in shops around the world.
I am very happy to champion both.
Just look at what a great product our salmon farmers are producing. It is extremely efficient: less feed is needed to produce 1kg of salmon than any other major farmed protein.
It is not a wasteful product either: far more edible meat comes off a salmon than chicken, pork or beef. As for its environmental credentials, farmed salmon has the lowest carbon footprint of any comparable protein, water consumption is far lower too and, of course, it is lean, healthy and packed with Omega 3.
Then there’s the economic benefit: 2,300 direct jobs and 10,000 indirect jobs, average wages of £34,000 and a huge boost to the country’s balance of payments with £600million in exports.
In fact, Salmon is not just Scotland’s biggest food export, it is the United Kingdom’s biggest and it regularly comes top in taste tests, reinforcing its position as the best salmon in the world.
OUT at sea too, Scotland’s salmon farmers are setting new standards. Sea lice levels are at their lowest for six years, with farmers using natural methods much more widely – like cleaner fish – to keep levels down.
In short, this is a great Scottish success story, a success story that is being talked down by the grumblings of a few unhappy anglers who refuse to acknowledge that the ‘enemy’ they blame for so much could actually help to provide the solution to their biggest problem, the decline in wild salmon.
So, my message to my fellow anglers is this: don’t get seduced by the wild eco-warriors and fringe environmental activists who want to close down everything salmonrelated, farmed and rod-caught.
Listen to the voices of people like Mr Gibb who wants to bring fish back to his river and who knows where best to get the help to do just that.
And, above all, listen to the sounds of your youth. If you shut your eyes I bet you, too, can hear that reel scream for the first time and the thrill it gave you.
If you truly want your sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters to experience that too, then find out the reasons – the real reasons – why our salmon are disappearing and then work out ways to get them back.
Hamish Macdonell is director of strategic engagement, Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation.