Seals watch
We need to engage more salmon farming companies, says seals campaigner
THE number of seal kill licences issued by the Scottish government in 2018 was down 81 per cent on 2011, when the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010 came into force. Last year, a total of 45 licences were issued, of which 27 were for protection of health and welfare and one for prevention of serious damage, covering a total of 215 individual fish farms.
The other 17 licences issued for prevention of serious damage covered rivers and estate fisheries (source: Scottish Government Seal Licensing).
In the first half 2019, the latest figures available (for farms and fisheries), 30 grey seals were shot, the same as the corresponding period last year.
And seven common seals were shot, an increase of 5.9 per cent compared to the previous year’s licences.
The figures represent a fraction of the total seal population but they are still too high to comply with the US zero tolerance policy enshrined in the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA).
Seal campaigners, who have long worked with the salmon industry to reduce shooting, say despite the massive reduction since 2011, the numbers being shot are no longer going down.
‘As far as I’m concerned, any seals shot are too many and they’re not addressing the problem,’ said Andy Ottaway, executive director of the Seal Protection action Group.
Ottaway believes there is a ‘mythology’ in the industry that what works for one farmer doesn’t neccessarily work for someone else.
‘You still need a scientifically rigorous and methodical study supported by the entire industry that comes up with real solutions,’ he said.
This demand will be met in part by the research project currently being undertaken by Marine Scotland and the University of St Andrews.
Alexander Coram of St Andrews University’s Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), which is conducting the research, said while the focus is on acoustic deterrent devices (ADDs), it will include a review of other strategies too, anything that people want to give them information about.
The project is collecting data from farm companies and will analyse what’s effective and what’s not; this information will then feed into a Scottish government review of ADD policy.
The St Andrews SMRU is part of the Salmon Aquaculture and Seals Working Group (SASWG), established by Ottaway in 2008.
Among its founder members were Marine Harvest (now Mowi), Sainsbury’s, Marine Scotland, the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation, the RSPCA, and Scottish Natural Heritage.
Chaired by leading seals expert Dr Simon Northridge, of SMRU, the group has made progress in addressing the predation problem.
But there have been no meetings in more than a year and Ottaway, who has been involved in environmental campaigning for 35 years and seal campaigns for more than 15 years, warns against complacency in the industry.
He said SASWG had ‘re-energised a dialogue with Mowi’ but he would like to see more involvement from the rest of the industry, to better understand the circumstances in which people feel forced to shoot seals.
Coram agreed that the group has been NGO driven and ‘there has never been a huge amount of industry engagement’.
However, he said a few things that have been developed in the industry could make ‘a serious difference’, such as the trend away from the nylon, older type of nets to plastic HDPE nets.
Where plastic nets (such as Seal Pro) had been installed, farmers have been reporting a 100 per
“The US legislation is protecting the world’s marine mammals… why aren’t we protecting own?” our
cent reduction in seal predation, he said.
‘There is no real scientific evidence to support that but it’s what we’ve been hearing from the sites, particularly up in the Northern Isles where they are trialling it [and where they have had problems in the past].’
Coram would like to see further research, especially with the new type of nets, to see how that affects seal behaviour.
It has been more than three years since the last such investigation (Plugging the Gaps- Improving Our Knowledge of How Predators Impact Salmon Farms by Coram, Northridge, and Michael Mazilu, also of St Andrews) and the mechanism of how seals attack pens is still a little unknown, said Coram.
Behaviour underwater is difficult to monitor in the wild, although the cameras – an increasingly common fixture in cages – must record some seal behaviour, he said.
‘They do tend to attack from the outside. Occasionally, they’ll get in over the top of a net or through a hole, but mostly they will bite fish from outside the net.’
Sometimes they will pick off the mortalities but that is certainly not always the case, he added.
‘I’ve seen occasions where there have been hundreds, or even thousands, of healthy fish that have been killed from the outside.
‘They don’t even get the whole fish out of the net…they use the slack in the net to bite the belly of the fish normally, kill it, often just leave it and go and kill another one.’
Ottaway insists the way forward to prevent such costly predation is for all players to continue to work together. And if the US legislation focuses minds, it is to be welcomed.
He points out that the Marine Mammal Protection Act is the same law that has policed the global whaling ban since that was passed 30 years ago.
‘It says an awful lot that the US legislation is protecting the world’s marine mammals…why aren’t we protecting our own?’