SALMON CONUNDRUM

It is widely suggested that wild Atlantic salmon could be extinct within 20 to 30 years. However, this timespan could be significantly reduced with Salmon & Trout Conservation’s (S&TC) latest campaign [see Comment, February issue]. This is because it diverts attention from attempts to understand why salmon are in so much trouble. Its campaign aims to persuade hospitality to stop serving farmed salmon, the production of which S&TC blames for the decline of wild salmon. However, this campaign will never halt the decline of these fish because salmon farming is not to blame.

Andrew Graham-stewart of S&TC writes that from the 1990s, the demise of wild salmon coincided with the inexorable growth of the salmon farming industry. However, wild salmon’s problems were apparent long before then. Data from NASCO shows that numbers of salmon returning to Scottish rivers were already in decline from the early 1970s, long before salmon farming was established.

At the current rate of decline, the number of returning salmon will soon drop below those required to maintain a spawning stock. In 2017, the Prince of Wales spoke at the Atlantic Salmon Trust’s 50th Anniversary dinner. He told the audience that: “Thirty years ago, up to one in four Atlantic salmon would make it back. Today, it is only one in 20.” It is now even less and, as His Royal Highness highlighted, we don’t even know why this is happening.

S&TC lay the blame firmly at the door of the salmon farming industry. Yet they have still to provide any firm evidence to back their claims. What evidence that exists is largely circumstantial.

So, what do we know? The answer is ‘very little’.

Salmon catches have been officially recorded from 1952 onwards. The number of salmon caught from the area of the west coast known as the ‘Aquaculture Zone’ (AZ) has typically been about 10% of the total Scottish rod catch. Yet if Mr Graham-stewart was correct and local west coast salmon stocks had been wiped out by the presence of salmon farms, the remaining 90% of