SPECIAL REPORTS

The Wild Salmon Debate

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Pictured Recipe: Fennel-Crusted Salmon on White Beans

But did they kill enough salmon to harm whole populations? The industry said “No.” But a paper in the journal Science published last December demonstrated convincingly that sea lice from salmon farms in British Columbia’s Broughton archipelago, a collection of islands and channels between North Vancouver Island and the mainland, are exterminating entire native runs of pink salmon.

The salmon industry at Broughton mirrors the industry’s worldwide development. Broughton got its first farms in the late 1980s, and by 2005 it had over 20 farms holding millions of Atlantics. These farms were releasing tens of millions of sea lice. Over the past five years these sea lice, floating in great density in the channels in which the salmon farms float, have forced virtually every pink salmon leaving the Broughton archipelago to swim through an infested gauntlet to try to reach the ocean. The wild pink fingerlings, their skin still unscaled, pick up two, three, a half-dozen lice apiece—tolerable to adults, perhaps, but not to these finger-sized smolts. “They are not equipped to survive this,” says Alexandra Morton, director of the Salmon Coast Field Station and a co-author of the paper, “and they don’t.” This infestation is wiping out the wild pink salmon runs whose rivers flow from the mainland into the Broughton archipelago. Analysis of returns and comparisons to nearby rivers without farms show the lice are killing 80 percent of the pinks that run the sea-lice gauntlet. At that rate, and with the pinks’ two-year-long life cycle, the several river populations of pink salmon that must run the Broughton gauntlet could be 99 percent extinct by 2011.

Maybe this is not so bad. This is only one river basin, and the salmon are pinks, which, being low-fat and lacking that salmony taste, mostly get smoked, salted or canned. And the pink-salmon populations in other rivers will be unaffected, at least as long as no one builds salmon farms in their river mouths. Yet the either-or nature of this disaster deeply disturbs me. It could hardly be more clear: we must either close those farms or kiss those runs of wild salmon goodbye.

I’m increasingly convinced that the larger issue of farmed versus wild salmon poses a similar choice. The withering array of injuries that salmon farms inflict on wild salmon forces a sort of long-range consumer decision. This is not like deciding whether you want free-range versus conventional chicken for tonight’s dinner; that’s a decision with limited echo. To decide that you may as well eat farmed Atlantic tonight, however, is to decide, in a very real sense, that you may as well eat farmed salmon, and farmed salmon only, forever. You may feel differently. But that just doesn’t sit well with me. For now, anyway, I’ve eaten my last farmed salmon.

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