Conscious Choice: Something Fishy About Farmed Salmon

February 2004

Something Fishy About Farmed Salmon

by Ben Parfitt

A couple of months ago one of the world’s largest seafood sellers made a small but noticeable change on its Web site. Below the smiling face of its trademark mermaid logo, San Diego-based Chicken of the Sea International posted a note stating that it was committed to using only those salmon caught at sea, specifically the wilds of the Pacific Ocean. Buying farm-raised fish, the company said, was not an option.

As actions go, Chicken of the Sea’s announcement could be seen as something of a coup for environmental organizations. After all, numerous campaigns are underway to battle North America’s burgeoning salmon farming industry. And one of the battlegrounds of choice is the American market, where Chicken of the Sea holds a prominent position as the second-largest seller of canned salmon.

But it was not big news for Chicken of the Sea. Van Effner, the company’s director of marketing, said the Web posting was simply a way to deal with a small number of callers who were pestering the company about where its products originated. So a decision was made to tell everyone the same thing: All Chicken of the Sea salmon is produced from wild-caught Pacific salmon, not farm-raised.

That’s the kind of no-nonsense language that opponents of fish farming love. But it cost the company nothing. As Effner told Conscious Choice, the company has always used only two species of wild salmon — pink salmon and sockeye, neither of which are species of choice on fish farms. Wild pink salmon are so cheap that commercial fishermen practically give them away, and sockeye salmon have proven much more difficult to raise than other salmon species.

In the business of marketing fish for many years, Effner says that most American consumers are hopelessly uninformed about salmon. Ask them what kind of salmon they’ve bought, which ocean it came from, and whether or not it was raised in captivity, and the answer to all three questions will likely be a big, blank stare. "People for the most part have no idea that there are many species of salmon, let alone where the fish that they buy comes from," Effner says.

Attack of the Killer Lice

If ignorance is bliss, a little knowledge can reveal ignorance to be dangerous. Salmon farms — which are likely where your salmon comes from if you are not paying attention — are linked to a host of troubling problems that pose risks not only to local waters but to distant ocean fisheries.

Alexandra Morton, by profession a whale biologist, recently became distracted by something disturbing that was happening to the wild salmon where she lives. For 20 years she has called Guildford Island home. Sandwiched between Vancouver Island and the mainland coast of British Columbia, Guildford is in the Broughton Archipelago, a collection of islands whose adjacent waters are home to a large number of salmon farms.

Morton wanted to understand why so many of the region’s wild pink salmon were being attacked by naturally occurring pests known as sea lice. While sea lice have long posed some risk to wild salmon, they generally have not been a big problem because wild fish disperse over wide areas.

But what Morton noticed was that the lice seemed to attach themselves in greater numbers to wild fish swimming near fish farms. The results were not pretty. Juvenile pink salmon emerging from their river homes are tiny and extremely vulnerable to lice attacks. Once attached, a louse will track across a fish’s body, feeding on its protective outer layer of mucus before eating through scales and skin. Just one louse reaching adulthood on a small fish may be enough to kill it.

After three years of sampling, Morton discovered a significant correlation between lice outbreaks and incidence of widespread death among wild salmon stocks. "It’s devastating," she says. "The pinks are collapsing again this fall, and once again it’s only the rivers that are putting out the juveniles near farms that are getting hit. Alaskan fishermen are telling me that on the rivers away from the farms the fish are doing great. As a matter of fact, pinks are coming back in unheard-of numbers...but near the farms up to 90 percent of the pinks are missing.

Such collapses have untold consequences for species on land and water, Morton says, noting that pink salmon are a major food source for bears as well as for other fish. But that’s not the only concern. Disease outbreaks on farms are not uncommon. A virus known as Infectious Hemapoietic Necosis (or IHN) swept through six salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago last year, killing most farmed fish and placing nearby wild stocks at risk.

Morton witnessed the unfolding of one outbreak on one farm. "You could see eyeballs and intestines wafting into Kingcome Inlet," Morton recalls. "There was a barge there for two months coming and going, lifting totes of rotting fish. The smell was enough to make you lose your cookies. And tied up next to the barge was a seiner packer sorting out the good fish [for processing and sale]."

On the Frontier

Morton’s tales from salmon farming’s frontier are not common knowledge in the U.S. But they are very familiar to the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, a coalition of nine groups in British Columbia, where the fish farming/aquaculture industry grows tens of millions of pounds of salmon each year.

According to Alliance spokeswoman Jennifer Lash, farmed salmon sell in large numbers in California, Oregon and Washington, but also in urban centers farther east, such as Chicago.

"Eighty percent of the salmon that’s farmed in B.C., is exported, and almost 100 percent of it goes to the U.S.," Lash says. "Some polling work done a couple of years ago showed that most educated buyers believed farmed salmon was better for the environment because it took pressure off of fishing wild stocks. Now, thanks to a lot of campaigning, those same buyers are realizing that eating farmed salmon puts additional pressure on wild stocks."

Nonetheless, for many consumers a salmon is a salmon is a salmon. And changing that perception requires much more work. Just how much becomes apparent when considering the sheer volume of farm-raised salmon consumed in America. H.M. Johnson & Associates, a seafood marketing company based in Jacksonville, Oregon, reports that there was a surge in the consumption of farmed salmon in the U.S. in the latter half of the 1990s. In the five years ending in 1999, per capita consumption skyrocketed by 42 per cent, fueled largely by imports of one salmon species and product.

The species was Atlantic salmon and the product fillets. Between 1996 and 2000, imports of Atlantic salmon fillets to the U.S. rose a staggering fivefold from 10,000 metric tons to 50,000 metric tons. Why the surge? First, more consumers believe that eating fish, and in particular salmon, is a healthy alternative to other protein sources. Second, there is just plain more of it than ever before. Third, with more availability, prices are falling. And finally, salmon is being more aggressively marketed than ever before.

Put these together and the result is that Atlantic salmon has emerged as one of the fish species of choice in America, exceeded only by canned tuna and shrimp.

But the rapid rise in salmon consumption, although based partly on a degree of nutritional awareness, isn’t matched by a rise in consumer awareness. This same consumer analysis showed that 55 percent of American consumers had no idea whether what they ate was caught in the ocean or raised in an aquatic feedlot.

The reason is that labeling of salmon is often vague and misleading. Words like "fresh" and "Atlantic" conjure images of fish being netted at sea and scooped over the gunwales of fishing boats. But the reality is far different. These days the salmon on your dinner plate more likely comes from a farm, particularly if it is labeled Atlantic.

Growing Like Hell

Just how did a species that has been severely over-fished throughout the North Atlantic become the salmon of choice on today’s fish farms? Mostly because Atlantic salmon are more easily raised than their Pacific counterparts.

At a hatchery north of Campbell River, roughly at the midpoint on the long eastern coastline of Vancouver Island, millions of tiny salmon are raised in tanks until they are transported to floating farms moored offshore.

To listen to Mike McMann, the hatchery’s affable manager, is to understand just how far the industry has come in breeding fish that feed efficiently and grow quickly. "We have stocks of Atlantic salmon that are so domesticated that they’ll lay on the surface of the water and get sunburnt because they’re too stupid to go under," he says. According to McMann, today’s farm-raised Atlantic salmon shares much in common with your average broiler chicken. "It doesn’t hardly swim," McMann says. "It just sits there and stuffs groceries in and grows like hell."

But the broiler chicken comparison goes only so far. Unlike chickens, salmon are cold-blooded carnivores. To grow them to marketable size takes 18 months (you could raise a dozen generations of broiler chickens in the same time).

On today’s salmon farms a half million or more fish vie for space in connected netted pens. Surrounded on all sides by nets, farmed fish swim, eat and defecate in the same waters as their wild counterparts. All that separates the two populations is the net mesh.

Farm workers call the pens, which are roughly 100 feet square, "hundred bys." During the summer when the water is warm and metabolism rates high, a half-million farm fish will consume about 18 tons of food per day.

Feeding farmed salmon always has been the single biggest expense in fish-farming operations, and Stolt Sea Farm Inc., a Norwegian-owned company, has emerged as one of the leaders in salmon-feeding technology. The company’s technical director of operations in British Columbia is Keng Pee Ang.

Pee Ang created an extremely effective way of making the feeding of salmon more efficient. It is no easy task to gauge how well fish in a 100-foot-deep column of water feed. To understand that, Pee Ang placed underwater cameras in the pens. The cameras allowed farm workers to see how the fish behaved during feeding and to make on-the-spot decisions about changing the frequency and volume of feed entering the water.

Feed is delivered to farm fish through long black PVC tubes that snake like octopus’s arms from storage sheds, where tons of food are stored, to the net pens. The feed, which looks a lot like an oily version of dry dog food, is pushed by air through the pipes and delivered in wide, arcing circles out of a whirring metal tube. The tube sits atop a three-legged floating stand that looks a lot like an oversize circular lawn sprinkler.

With feed for bigger fish costing up to $1,200 per ton, there is great economic incentive to eliminate waste. "In the past without cameras, farmers would just be putting feed in the water and not knowing what’s happening," Pee Ang says. "By putting the camera down there, I’ve opened a whole new environment." The result is that modern-day fish farmers are rapidly approaching the point where they can grow one pound of farmed salmon for each pound of feed.

Still, even the most efficient farms go through billions and billions of pellets in growing their fish to a typical 17-pound harvesting weight. On a farm with half a million resident Atlantic salmon, about 3,550 tons of feed is required — enough pellets to fill an Olympic-size pool from the bottom to the brim with enough material left over to fill it half again.

Included in the pellets is an artificial chemical colorant. In the wild, salmon come by their robust orange-pink flesh naturally by eating tiny shrimp-like creatures called krill. But on farms, that food source is not readily available — so artificial means are utilized for boosting the color.

But the chemical colorant is just the tip of the iceberg. There are far more serious concerns associated with the fish feed.

Turning Wild Fish into Fish Meal

What may surprise many consumers is that the feed is mostly derived from wild fish. Yes, to grow a carnivorous fish species like salmon, you actually have to catch a whole lot of fish in the ocean first — so much so that for each pound of farmed salmon grown a little more than three pounds of wild fish is converted to fish meal and fish oil. Much of that fish comes from off of the coast of Peru, where anchovies are caught by the billions for the sole purpose of turning them into feed for farmed salmon.

In 2000, Rosamond Naylor, an economist at Stanford University, was lead author of a report in Nature that examined the fish-to-fish phenomenon. Naylor later elaborated on that work in a 2001 article in Issues in Ecology, noting that to grow one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of farmed salmon, 3.16 kilograms (nearly seven pounds) of wild fish was turned into fish meal.

"If the goal of aquaculture is to produce more fish for consumers than can be produced naturally," Naylor warned, "then it will become increasingly counterproductive to farm carnivores that must be fed large amounts of wild-caught fish that form the foundation of the food chain."

And that perhaps more than anything cuts to the heart of today’s debate over farmed salmon. At the top of the food chain, humans have some measure of control over what they eat. If on the one hand they believe that eating a fish raised in captivity may spare the life of a fish caught at sea, they may opt for eating the farmed fish. If on the other hand they take a broader ecological view, they may conclude that eating a farmed salmon contributes to an even greater drawing down of life in the world’s oceans.

Ben Parfitt is a longtime award-winning writer on natural resources and science topics. He lives in Victoria, B.C.

Warning on Farmed Salmon

Farm-raised salmon is so contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals that people should eat it no more than once a month, according to a study released last month by the journal Science.

The 14 chemicals studied, most of them pesticides, all are banned in the U.S. But they can linger for decades in the environment and in the human body and are present in the smaller fish that are ground up and fed to salmon raised in giant ocean cages.

"We are certainly not telling people not to eat fish...We’re telling them to eat less farmed salmon," said David Carpenter of the University at Albany, N.Y., who led the new research.

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