Atlantic salmon swim far and wide after fish farm collapse | Hacker News Reader

Atlantic salmon swim far and wide after fish farm collapse

kuow.org

122 pointscurtis51 comments

I thought this part was interesting:

> More recently, Atlantic salmon have escaped fish farms in Washington by the thousands, apparently without gaining a finhold in the wild:

> * 1996: 107,000 fish swim free after an anchor line fails on a salmon farm

> * 1997: 369,000 fish escape while a salmon farm is towed away from a toxic algae bloom

> * 1999: 115,000 fish break loose from a net-pen during a strong tidal current

It is too bad the reason for why they never take hold is never really outlined in the article. Is it the environment? Or some other species that prevents eggs from taking hold?

Either way, sounds like most most of these will also share the same fate.

Are Atlantic salmon not migratory like Pacific salmon?

Pacific salmon are born in fresh water rivers and travel downstream to the river. When it's time to mate, they migrate back up fresh water streams they were born in to mate and then die.

If you were farm born and raised then where would you migrate to mate?

Good Question. But do they not get fished / killed before they mate?

As one of the point of farming them is that dont get to fresh water and decrease the risk of parasites.

The ones that escaped the farm might not get killed.

The article mentions the farmed fish spread parasites because of the cramped spaces. I’m assuming a greater chance of parasites in farm than in the wild?

About the only thing Atlantic salmon have in common with Pacific salmon is being called salmon and being a member of the trout family.

From what I've found in my extensive research (5 minutes of Googling), Atlantic salmon still migrate to fresh water sources however unlike their Pacific counterparts they don't die after spawning.

Someone should tag and release a bunch of farm raised salmon and see what happens to them.

The article mentions that they have difficulty feeding in Pacific waters. “Stomachs full of wood chips, or empty”

I'd hazard a guess that that's because they're farm born fish that have been released into the wild, than because they're in pacific waters. Previously they have simply eaten whatever pellets got thrown into their pen. Now they don't know what to eat.

As expected, because genetics (and being domestic animals without survival skills)

Based on what happened in the south of Chile, I think they might want to wait a couple more decades before claiming escaped salmon didn't gain finhold in the wild:

My uncle was among the pioneers of salmon farming in the south of Chile on the early 70s. A storm destroyed their first farm causing salmon to escape to the ocean. The escaped salmon (chinook) started showing back in noticeable numbers just around 10 years ago.

OTOH, up until 1991, they were trying to deliberately introduce Atlantic salmon.

So when I go to the market and get "Wild Caught Salmon" it really could be farm raised salmon that escaped and were subsequently fished in the vicinity?

Perhaps - if you live on the west coast and get "fresh wild caught Atlantic salmon" ;)

Ha, maybe that's why they say "Wild Caught" and not "Wild".

A caught fish could be wild, or from a hatchery. You can tell the difference since hatchery fish have a fin removed but I imagine it's easier to not differentiate when labelling.

The meat looks significantly different when comparing wild pacific to atlantic.

But yes, shady fish distributors have been caught selling cheaper fish as the more expensive.

For me Atlantic vs Sockeye or Copper River Salmon. Atlantic is usually a faded pink orange color. It’s more like Arctic Char. Pacific Sockeye is extremely red.

Another fact, the only native Trout species in my state, Georgia, is Brook trout. They are actually closer to Arctic Char than trout or salmon.

Copper River salmon isn't a species, it's acrually multiple kinds of pacific salmon with extra marketing and branding.

Kings, sockeyes and cohos. It's all caught in Prince William Sound near the mouth of the Copper River. I grew up fishing there. There is a lot of marketing, but I think it tastes way better than farmed or Atlantic salmon and just can't bring myself to eat that.

Not saying it isn’t good marketing. I can see a visible difference between Copper River salmon and salmon of the same species from somewhere else.

Unless you caught it yourself, color is a particularly bad way to determine the kind of salmon you’re looking at; Fish farms feed their fish a steady diet of red dye to colorize their flesh: https://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color...

oh man, this just ruined my day. You can normally see the difference immediately by color between farm and wild raised.

At least they have to label it as color added now...

I trust some of the places I get my fish. Certainly not the big chains.

I've always assumed that "Wild Caught" was used a purpose so the fish could be farmed, but then let loose and caught in the "wild". But maybe it's more difficult to do that.

Locally sourced = bought from the supermarket down the road

I would be highly suspicious of anything calling itself "wild" and "Atlantic" in the same breath. There is almost no wild Atlantic salmon fishery left in the United States and Canada. It's all farm raised. Occasionally you can find legitimately wild Atlantic catch in Scotland or Norway. But wild catch makes up less than 1% of all Atlantic salmon on the market.

So if you want wild salmon, start by looking for a Pacific label, a listed species, or a regional designation of some kind. That's still not a guarantee, but it narrows things down quite a bit.

For what it's worth, 90% of all salmon on the US market is farmed. So if you're at a restaurant or a BBQ and aren't sure what you're getting, you're probably getting farm-raised Atlantic salmon.

A BBQ? That's farm raised catfish.

There are still some wild Atlantic salmon, if you don't mind a bit of a drive and hike.

No river scent cues to follow, they will probably scatter and not establish any sort of breeding population - if they have any fertility left?

If just say 10 of them were swept into the same river and eventually stream, they would have a chance at it. It's just the luck of numbers so far. After all, there's no law of nature that says atlantic salmon are only in the atlantic.

Right, but genetic diversity of the breeding population would be very low, making the population itself very fragile. And that's assuming the spawn survive their first season. (Most young salmon spawn do not survive, and those not native to the local waters face unique challenges.)

This doesn't seem to be a case where the invading species gains an immediate upper hand in its new environment. (Cf., the rampant python population in the Florida Everglades.) In this case, the invading Atlantic species faces stiff and probably superior competition from the various Pacific salmon species, which are every bit as big and fast, and which fill the same ecological niche. Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon. It also knows the territory, including where and what to hunt, and its wild instincts haven't been dulled in a fish farm.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager on the native Pacific populations over the scattered pockets of farm-raised exotics nearly 99 times out of 100. Barring human involvement, of course. If we hunt the Pacific species out of existence, or damage the environment beyond recognition, all bets are off.

> Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon.

They don't have to be bigger and faster, with precise 'local knowledge' to be dangerous to an ecosystem. They merely have to be different.

Perhaps their small size will cause them to escape the attention of normal predators, or their lack of knowledge of what to eat causes them to decimate some species that Pacific salmon don't eat.

Atlantic salmon aren't "different" enough from the various Pacific salmon species to occupy their own niche in the Pacific Northwest. If the big ones are too big for you, there are also medium-sized species and smaller species.

The Atlantic salmon is a big, predatory fish that needs to eat a lot of smaller species to stay alive. In the Pacific Northwest region, pretty much every species that could sustain the Atlantic salmon is also preyed upon by an extant, native salmon variety of some stripe. If the Atlantic salmon possessed some sort of advantage in obtaining one prey species or another, then there you go, there's a niche it can adapt to. Thus far, we haven't seen that advantage materialize, or the niche appear.

I apologize if some of the nuance of this point was lost in my "bigger, faster" figure of speech. My tl;dr here is that exotic species don't just magically, automatically win in a new environment simply because they're exotic. To thrive, their exoticism needs to confer some specific competitive advantage within the local ecosystem. I'm struggling to see what that advantage is for the Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Northwest, simply because the oceans and waterways in that region are teeming with very, very similar competitors.

I'm not sure what it means to be 'swept' into a river.. they would need to purposefully swim upstream. They might do that or they might not. Salmon live out in the sea and when they are ready (I think) follow the scents of the river of their birth to spawn. I presume that these don't actually have an impression of the scent so won't be heading anywhere. In fact, the article says they are having trouble feeding in the wild, so those that have swum 250 miles have mostly done so on empty stomachs..

because of all this I think the chance of them establishing a life is slim (but of course, there were a lot of them)

Not sure how it works with farmed salmon, but farmed trout that are used to stock fisheries are usually triploid (and so infertile) because they grow faster.

Exact. This is the main point here.

Interesting.

A Naive question, how do they become triploid?

https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=94602 says they pressure-treat the eggs at a specific time, causing them to retain a chromosome.

I couldn't say for certain, not being a fish farmer, but using hybrids is common in agriculture. You'll maintain multiple germ lines and cross them to produce more desirable offspring which either don't breed true or aren't viable adults or are infertile. Happens with chickens, corn, mules.

Edit: just read other reply; yup, not a fish farmer.

In-vitro fertilization + genetic selection and manipulation of the eggs. A standard procedure.

Based on this article, I would not be left feeling too concerned that Atlantic salmon escaped in the pacific northwest. It seems this isn't the first time its happened, and the many previous releases have come to basically nothing.

Is this treated as an environmental crime?

Is more like a really, really good fishing day.

People freak out in the moment, usually there's some kind of fine, and then nothing really changes.

Almost like financial crime.

In this case, the escaped fish have very little chance of establishing a breeding population, so it's sort of moot.

We keep hearing how farm raised fish are genetically inferior...so let's put them to the test.

Do salmon need estuaries to find their way back to their breeding grounds?

looks like that crazy fish really did it as in Shawshank Redemption

---come on guys, let's make a swim for it! (as in run for it)

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