Focus on farms fails to explain paradox of east coast collapse
THIS year has been declared the International Year of the Salmon to raise awareness of the precarious state of wild stocks.
In his opening speech to the Fisheries Management Scotland conference, chief executive Alan Wells spelt out how worrying the picture was for the species in Scottish rivers.
Although official figures for last year’s catches were not yet available, these were likely to show the lowest total on record.
The picture of decline is worldwide and marine survival of Atlantic salmon is at a historic low, below five per cent, he said.
‘We hope the International Year of the Salmon will galvanise people to work together.’
The wild fisheries sector holds salmon farms, among other impacts such as climate change, accountable for the wild stocks decline.
The FMS wants to see any new salmon farms sited away from known migratory routes for wild salmon, and opposes current applications from farmers for increased production in the ‘aquaculture zone’.
Wells, who stressed that his organisation was ‘not anti-salmon farming’, said the FMS wanted to achieve the right developments in the right locations.
The FMS is involved in the Interactions Working Group and the Farmed Fish Health Framework, along with Marine Scotland, the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation, and salmon farmers, including Mowi.
Wells said last year’s parliamentary inquiries into the salmon farming industry concluded that the regulatory framework for salmon farms was confusing and poorly coordinated.
‘Wild fish tend to fall through the cracks just about at every stage [of the regulatory system],’ he said.
FMS is working with other partners, including Mowi, to develop techniques to sample wild fish and assess impacts of sea lice at a local level.
‘We are engaged in a very productive discussion with Mowi and the Argyll Fisheries Trust, with a view to developing an Environmental Management Plan which will meet the needs of fisheries managers,’ Wells wrote in the FMS annual review, distributed during the conference.
He told delegates that wild fisheries wanted adaptive management that could react to what’s happening on the ground.
‘We’re operating in a data poor environment so it’s something we’ll continually keep under scrutiny and we’ll be working hard with the sector and regulators to achieve a way forward.’
The focus on salmon farming, however, was later questioned by Jens Christian Holst, the Norwegian scientist who has developed a hypothesis that overgrazing and predation by mackerel is behind post smolt depletion.
‘We have an almost total salmon collapse in eastern Scotland, with no salmon farming, a collapse more severe than in Norway with 1.3 million tonnes of salmon farming,’ he said, following a presentation by Eric Sterud, who challenged Norway’s traffic light system of sea lice management.
‘How would you explain this paradox? Doesn’t it really intrigue you? Are you not interested in trying to find out about it.’
Sterud said he couldn’t explain the paradox because he wasn’t a scientist, but he conceded that ‘the scientists all agree that the problem is in the ocean’.
‘The problem is that the ocean mortality is way too high these days,’ Sterud said. ‘There is something going on in the marine environment, it could be due to lice, it could be due to other things…it could be different factors in different ecosystems.’