Fish Farms Pose Serious Danger to All Marine Life
Article adopted from "Fish Farms: Zero Tolerence", Union of BC Indian chiefs © 2002.
1. Disease
Farmed salmon are fed antibiotics to fight naturally occurring diseases. The antibiotics cause diseases to mutate and these mutant strains are released into the oceans exposing wild stocks. Viral, fungal and bacterial infections have passed to wild stock as a result of fish farms. Shellfish have been found with concentrations of antibiotics.
Antibiotics increase the likelihood that certain diseases will mutate and become resistant and can accumulate in the food chain.
In British Columbia, within the past years, there have been numerous outbreaks of sea lice which have infected wildstocks, and pose a particular danger to young salmon. Although sea lice occur naturally, sea lice outbreaks commonly occur on salmon farms and can infect the wild salmon population migrating past these areas, resulting in the death of many young salmon.
2. Pollution
A fish farm is equivalent to having an untreated sewage facility on our shores. Pollution and effluent flow freely from fish pens and cause most resident species of fish and marine life to disappear from the area.
3. Predation on Young
Young herring and salmon are drawn to fish pens because of the lights which they shine at night. These young herring and salmon are eaten by farmed fish. In some instances, farmed fish eat so many of the young wild stock that they have little need of additional food.
4. Algae
Effluent from fish farms provides ideal conditions for algae growth. Algae can kill wild stocks by poisoning them (through production of toxins, etc.) or through the oxygen deprivation they cause. In addition, shell fish are vulnerable to the toxins produced by excessive growth of algae. Toxins from algae can contaminate shellfish making them unsafe to eat.
5. Drugs and Chemicals
In addition to antibiotics, fish farms introduce a variety of other chemicals into the water. These chemicals poison the water and build up in the food supply. The chemicals include colourants (to make the flesh of farmed salmon red) and fungicides. These chemicals escape into surrounding waters, potentially poisoning resident marine life, and eventually poisoning the people that eat wild fish and shell fish.
6. Colonization
Farmed salmon which escape from their pens pose significant
risks to wild stocks. The dangers include: •Competition for food
and spawning areas. Farmed salmon can displace and force wild salmon
and other fish from their traditional grounds and waters.
• Farmed salmon can migrate with wild stocks to inland spawning
areas. In British Columbia, Atlantic salmon have been found 100 miles
up the Skeena River, over 250 miles from the nearest fish farm. On Vancouver
Island, Atlantic salmon have been found in the Zeballo and Thasis rivers.
Bearing in mind that one spawning Atlantic salmon can produce in excess
of 4000 eggs, the dangers are great that Atlantic salmon can displace
our own wild salmon stocks.
7. Herring, Oolichan and Rock Cod displacement
Fish farms located near herring spawning grounds, or the traditional habitat of oolichan and rock cod have caused these species to abandon their traditional areas.
