Canada Fish out of water

Every Thursday, Deena Woods visits the stalls at Granville Island Public Market, looking for seafood. Her family's favourite ocean protein is salmon, especially sockeye and Chinook. It has to be local; no flown-in foreign fish make it to her table. And it must be wild. Ms. Woods refuses to purchase farmed salmon, even though it's plentiful, affordable and raised just up the B.C. coast.

"There's too many issues around it," Ms. Woods says, citing common concerns about disease and environmental harm.

Most salmon farmed in B.C. aren't native, she knows. Hardier, more aggressive Atlantics dominate the industry. They are raised in large, open-net pens moored in coastal inlets and bays. The fish are frequently medicated. Their excrement drifts from their pens unfiltered, and mingles with the natural sea life. Occasionally, farmed Atlantics escape from their cages. Marine biologists say all of this makes a recipe for trouble in what's already a fragile, troubled ecosystem.

Ms. Woods also knows that wild Canadian salmon are threatened. Their populations rise and fall and cannot be predicted from one year to the next. Near-calamitous returns preceded last summer's giant run of Adam's River sockeye, for example. "There is a certain guilt factor associated with buying the wild stuff," she says. Read more...

This blog is written by Martin Little The Aquaculturists, published and supported by the International Aquafeed Magazine from Perendale Publishers.