SALMON POLITICS

Michael Wigan hopes the tide is turning as the Scottish government announces £700,000 for salmon research

Michael Wigan is buoyed by new funding for salmon research

Politics is only interesting for so long. But right now in early Spring, Scottish rivers and their migratory home-comers have not woken up. A few rivers are doing fine, but fellow anglers are not being woken at midnight to hear stories about playing the big one.

Salmon politics is changing. The Scottish Parliament is stirring from deep complacency. Suddenly it has announced £700,000 for salmon research. For a government strapped for cash, that is a lot. It has sensibly asked for advice from salmon managers about where to spend it.

There are two obvious areas, neither of which will provide easily digestible answers. One is investigation of predation on smolts, the next generation of salmon, whilst going downriver to sea around May. Several river boards, like the Deveron’s, have already reported alarming levels of predation.

Figures of up to 40% have been logged. Nearly half the young salmon may die in this brief window between leaving rivers and heading for the ocean. They depart the burns and upper tributaries where they have mastered the art of survival, shoal and head for sea. They are then unremittingly attacked on passage by sawbill ducks and cormorants.

Despite the fact that not long ago mergansers and goosanders were barely known in Scotland, these fish-eating birds now enjoy full legal protection. So do guzzling cormorants. Getting licenses to control even a few of either bird is notoriously difficult. If the government research came up with answers which are ‘tricky’, it would have to loosen up licensed controls.

The other knowledge gap is smolt survival whilst going northwards. This again is highly sensitive. It has been attempted once and the results were fascinating. The €5.5 million SALSEA research programme was funded by several countries, including America. Using basic dip-nets, research boats reckon that they caught smolts from 284 rivers, or around 80% of Europe’s most productive salmon rivers. Between 2008 and 2009 they sampled 27,000 young salmon.

The variety of predators jointly sampling smolts was astonishing. The list included sea bass, cod, saithe, pollock, seals, whales (yes!), sharks, tuna, even cuttlefish. Smolts, which themselves eat anything they can catch, are eaten by everything that can catch them. Scottish Government research should now be designed to check whether billions of parasitic sea lice bursting out of salmon farms, as established by the salmon farm inquiry, are damaging smolts at a whole species level on the migration north.

The Scottish government must shudder at the possibility of discovering that its pet industry is having malevolent effects across the ocean. But that is precisely the research anglers would support.

Government needs to detach itself from the pleasantly comforting teat of doing yet more research on parr survival and fry life in Scotland’s healthy and sometimes pristine rivers, and get into the warzone of savagely conflicting interests. We will see what they have the stomach for.

Meantime, the government has been electrified by the first chapter of the salmon farm enquiry. The SNP chairman of the environment and land reform committee advised the rural economy committee, next in line to report, that open sea net-pen salmon farming as presently conducted, cannot go on.

Its well-rehearsed defects need not be repeated. In addition, the enquiry heard how, by polluting the water, salmon farming has closed down many traditional industries. The government is now on notice to make major changes. The pollution of sea lochs and letting more diseased salmon escape into the ocean, at the behest of overbearing foreign multinationals, is unacceptable.

Scottish MPs are smelling the coffee. Washington State in the USA is about to eject net-pen salmon farming from its waters altogether. It will be the first statescale expulsion. Red lights are flashing. Scotland could be seen internationally as the last refuge for intensive-system fish farmers using its waters as free landfill. MSPs are asking awkward questions, committees are demanding changes. These are heady times.

“Smolts, which eat anything they can catch, are eaten by everything that can catch them