Thank you for explaining that "wild caught" Alaska salmon are really farmed! I was "tricked" by advertising!I hadn't read the original article in the Summer edition so I went to see what had been written that elicited this response. In an article called "Consider the Oyster" I found the passage that sparked the comment above:
He also retains mixed feelings about hatcheries, which are far more common than people realize. About half of Alaska’s “wild” salmon come from hatcheries, he says.
Fish from hatcheries do not breed with wild fish. But they do compete with them for food. And hatcheries can produce lots and lots of hungry salmon.
Ironically, the very fish that were supposed to save wild salmon runs may be contributing to their demise.
“They could be constantly facing this competition against these hatchery fish,” Hedgecock says. “Maybe they’d have a better chance of surviving if they didn’t have to compete.”
He would prefer to see more emphasis on the harder approach to conservation: fixing and protecting the salmon’s native habitat.
To use a drinking-water analogy, hatcheries are like an extra shot of chlorine: easy, fast and cheaper for a city than making sure it has great water to start with.
“By the time you get to a hatchery, you’re desperate,” Hedgecock says.
Is it true that half the Alaska salmon are hatchery salmon? The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) website has a link to a PDF file of the Alaska Salmon Enhancement Program 2008 Annual Report.
In the abstract is says:
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game oversees and regulates all state and private sector salmon enhancement and rehabilitation projects. Protection of Alaska’s natural salmon stocks requires stringent permitting processes. Geneticists, pathologists, and biologists review all projects prior to the issuance of a permit to operate a salmon ranching facility, transfer eggs or fish, or release any fish into Alaska waters. Pathology, genetic, coded wire tag, and otolith processing laboratories are maintained to provide both diagnostic information to Alaska Department of Fish and Game fishery managers, and inseason and technical expertise to the private sector.Hatchery operators collected over 1.6 billion salmon eggs and released over 1.4 billion juvenile fish. An estimated 60 million adult salmon of hatchery origin returned. The preliminary total statewide commercial salmon harvest was 146 million fish. There were approximately 133 million salmon harvested in the common property commercial fishery, and an estimated 45 million, or 34%, were produced by the Alaska salmon enhancement program. Enhanced salmon provided an estimated $110 million or 29% of the exvessel value of the statewide common property commercial harvest. The ocean ranching program employs hundreds of Alaskans in seasonal and fulltime jobs. It is considered the largest agricultural industry in Alaska. [emphasis added]
34% is not quite "almost half" but it is a big chunk.
I thought I knew the difference between hatchery fish and farmed fish, but I decided to check on that too.
So, JC is wrong when she says 'wild caught' salmon are farmed. Alaska salmon are not farm salmon as we all knew.Declines in wild populations gave rise to hatcheries in the Northwest beginning more than 100 years ago. Built primarily to produce fish for harvest, hatcheries compensate for freshwater habitat loss by increasing the survival of salmon through the early stages of their life cycle, and by receiving returning adults. Hatcheries now provide 70 percent of the salmon caught in Puget Sound—but they have also been identified as a contributor to the decline of wild populations. Comprehensive hatchery reform, however, aims to revolutionize how hatcheries are managed so they can help recover threatened and endangered wild populations and support sustainable fisheries. [emphasis added]
Farmed salmon are the livestock of the salmon world. Like hatchery fish, they are born and spend the early stages of their life cycle in human hands. While hatchery fish are then released to spend the majority of their life in the wild, farmed salmon are fed and matured into adults in large saltwater enclosures, usually along marine shorelines, before being harvested as food. The rapid growth in the farmed salmon industry in the last two decades has raised new questions about the environmental, social, and economic effects of salmon farms.
But 34% of the (presumably 2007) Alaska salmon harvest were hatchery fish. The State website adds the term "ocean ranching." The USC article says that hatchery salmon don't breed with wild salmon - which suggests to me hatchery salmon are not truly wild salmon, even if they have a wild experience for part of their lives. And they compete with wild salmon for food. And the USC article further suggests that the survival odds of wild salmon would be greater if there were not hatchery salmon. But what about the survival rate of Alaska fisherman? And big fishing companies? Is it ok to cause the extinction of wild salmon species so humans can eat? My initial reaction would be - perhaps if that was the only thing that prevented humans from starving. But humans have other options. The salmon don't.
I have a different sense of the meaning of the words 'wild Alaskan Salmon" now. There's a 1/3 chance they are hatchery fish. And those hatchery fish may be endangering wild salmon in the competition for the food.
This is something I've been meaning to write about, of late, but haven't pulled all the threads together in my head.
ReplyDeleteWhat Do We Know? (Pardon the joke.)
Not that much, really.
The Pacific Ocean is, essentially, a big black box -- an experiment with no controls to understand the effects of various inputs and actions. We are putting millions of hatchery fish into the system. The Russians and Japanese are doing the same thing. An untold number of hatchery fish go in each year. Add to this uncontrolled experiment other factors that we can't really assess for their effects, we just know they are happening: changing salinity, the decadal oscillation, varying overwintering conditions each year that affect fry survival, and, of course, the unknown food chain effects of harvesting a truly mind boggling quantity of pollock each year.
The factory trawling waste is reprehensible. But it is not the only thing going on out there. It is however, the only thing we can really wrap our brains around at the moment.
My 17' Klamath skiff is named "Stan Was Right." The name is based on a bumper sticker that appeared in Cordova in the late 1980s, before the Exxon Valdez tragedy.
ReplyDelete"Stan" was Stan Samuelson, a Cordova fisher who predicted that when the huge fisherman-owned Prince William Sound hatchery system was complete and operational, the hatchery managers at Esther Island, Main Bay and Sawmill Bay would release their stock at maximum survival windows for the young fish. In that way, these hatchery fish would compete unfairly against the natural stocks of similar ages that were randomly coming out of hundreds of small streams and rivers on the Sound.
Samuelson predicted that the hatchery fish would out-compete the others at an important developmental stage, and the result would be lower survival and lower mature weights for returning wild adults.
Soon afterward, fishing returns of adult weights of hatchery vs. wild salmon - mostly pink and chum - seemed to indicate that Stan WAS right. Hence the bumper sticker. But later years didn't show such strong indicators, and eventually hatchery managers came under pressure to release juveniles randomly, sort of an attempt to emulate nature.
Soon, there was another bumper sticker "Was Stan Right?"
Thanks CD and Phil. CD, I hope you still write that post.
ReplyDeleteI understand that hatchery salmon are grown in captivity and then released into the wild. But where do they get the eggs to hatch those salmon? Don't they have to go to the river or streams they return to, too catch the salmon for their eggs and sperm for the hatchery? When I was in elementary school we participated in a program with the alaska dep't of fish and game and produced and grew salmon in the classroom that we later returned to the wild after they reached the right maturity level. but we had to go to that certain creek to catch those particular salmon. And it was said that those salmon which we released would return to that same creek to spawn.
ReplyDeleteYou say that hatchery salmon don't mate with the wild salmon, but I find that hard to believe, because when the salmon spawn the females lay their eggs and the males then come and fertilize those eggs and any other eggs in that general area, because they are still in water and the sperm doesn't just settle on the bottom in that one spot. You have to understand that there is still a current where ever they spawn. So, I find it hard to believe that the wild and hatchery salmon don't mate, Because there are no facts, no evidence and no data to proove that statement as a fact
Anon, You write: "You say that hatchery salmon don't mate with the wild salmon.' Actually, in this post I'm basically quoting others who have more expertise than I. And directly related to your comment, I wrote:
ReplyDelete"The USC article says that hatchery salmon don't breed with wild salmon."
So, if you have questions go to the USC article and if that doesn't answer your question, check with the authors of the study.