No, it’s not Norway. It’s a salmon “ranch” in Crayfish Inlet in Southeast Alaska/NSRAA
In one of the stranger twists in the strange world of global salmon marketing, Alaska’s non-farm fish farmers played a role in convincing the Canadian city of Ottawa to order removal of billboards protesting farmed salmon.
The reason? “False advertising.”
And now the same environmental group involved in Ottawa – Wild First – is under fire in British Columbia for running radio advertisements claiming salmon farms have pushed wild Pacific salmon to “the brink of extinction,” according to the news website Business in Vancouver (BIV).
That claim is about as far from the truth as one can get. Salmon in the Pacific are today at numbers never seen in recorded history, but most of them are pink salmon. Some scientists contend this explosion of pinks due in part to the free-range fish farming efforts of hatchery operators in Alaska and Russia has reached the point where it is wreaking havoc with the entire North Pacific ecosystem.
But this isn’t what got Wild First’s billboards in trouble in Ottawa.
Technically, this is sort of semi-true in Alaska depending on how the argument is spun.
Alaska’s ban
The state in 1989 banned the practice of growing salmon to maturity in net pens for the purpose of selling them. But it has continued to allow private-non-profit hatcheries controlled by commercial fishermen to raise young salmon in net pens to improve their chances of survival when released into the sea.
Feeding those little salmon costs the hatcheries money, but the belief is that the cost of feeding little salmon in pens to grow them bigger before they go to sea is more than offset by their return in greater numbers as adults.
And the state allows the hatcheries to recoup the costs with their hatchery-own “cost recovery” fisheries.
How many young, wild fish lose out to their bigger hatchery competitors because of the special treatment hatchery fry get is a subject no one talks about and which the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, once one of the world’s most respected fish management agencies, has consciously avoided studying.
Researchers looking for long-term damage to Prince William Sound due to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill did in 2017 stumble onto indications that the now massive Sound production of hatchery pinks was reducing the return of prized and valuable sockeye salmon to the Copper River just south of the Sound, but the findings were largely ignored.
On the national and international level – where Alaska differentiates its “ranched” salmon from “farmed salmon” and markets its fish as “wild-caught” – none of this has attracted little attention although the Washington-state-based Wild Fish Conservancy did cite the Alaska hatcheries as a problem when it earlier this year petitioned the federal government to put Alaska Chinook salmon on the endangered species list.
Chinook, or king salmon as Alaskans more commonly call them, compete with pinks for food at sea. The largest of the five North American salmon species, kings have been in decline for decades.
One theory for this is that pinks, the smallest of the North American salmon, have a competitive advantage in the game of survival in a warmer Pacific, and kings are paying the price not only for the vast number of pinks attributable to Alaska salmon managers dedicated to the idea of “maximum sustained yield” but for hatchery production driven solely by profit motives.
Up until now, Alaska hatchery operators have largely managed to keep their industry under covers by citing the state’s 1989 ban on “fish farming” and pretending that “ranching” is environmentally friendlier than “farming,” though there is no real evidence to support this idea given that so little is known about the interactions of wild and hatchery fish in the vastness of the Pacific.
The conflicts there are poorly studied in part because the state and federal governments, which demand exhaustive studies before almost anything is dumped into the nation’s waters, have never demanded environmental studies of dumping little salmon into the ocean.
Nor has there been much effort put into investigating the net-pen rearing of young hatchery salmon in Alaska despite that activity presenting the same excess feed and fish waste problems of net-pen rearing at the farms being run by salmon farmers in Norway, Chile and elsewhere.
Those farmers try to contain their fish rather than intermingle them with wild fish.
They are not always successful, however, and net-pen salmon sometimes escape as was the case in Iceland in September, which led The Guardian to headline “Thousands of salmon escaped an Icelandic fish farm. The impact could be deadly.”
The fish were nearly mature Atlantic salmon from Norway that are native to the Atlantic Ocean, but some headed for Icelandic streams and rivers to try to spawn.
“This is an environmental catastrophe,” 73-year-old Icelander Jakob Jakobsson told reporter Karen McVeigh from the London-based newspaper. “If they breed, the salmon will lose their ability to survive.”
“Indeed, studies have shown interbreeding between farmed and wild fish produces offspring that mature faster and younger, undermining the ability of the species to reproduce in nature,” McVeigh added.
The “escapees” in Iceland numbered in the tens of thousands. The “dumpies” in Alaska annually number in the hundreds of millions, and they have now invaded almost every stream in the Sound and many on Kodiak Island.
No catastrophe yet
State studies have concluded those hatchery fish gone feral are not as successful as wild fish at reproducing in Alaska wilderness streams and rivers, but to date no serious problems have been linked to their intermixing with wild fish.
(As to sea lice, they are commonly found on nearly all adult, wild salmon returning to Alaska and have never been considered to be a problem for adult fish. The issue with sea lice comes when they infect young fish in which case they can cause mortalities, and young salmon seldom mix with mature salmon which could infect them.)
Ottawa officials, pushed by the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance, took a look at the totality of what was going on in Alaska and decided that the “ranching” constitutes “farming” and thus the claim farming was banned in Alaska was inaccurate.
As for the states of Oregon and Washington, they are engaging in the same type of ocean ranching as Alaska but at a tiny fraction of the scale.
Alaska aquaculture operations “grew approximately 1.9 billion juvenile salmon in a combination of land-based hatcheries and ocean-based net pens in 2022,” the website added. “The fish are reared in marine net pens for approximately five months before being released into the wild in late spring to supply the commercial fishing industry and sport angling sector.
“”In an age of misinformation, we are pleased that the right thing happened – false ads that did not stand up to the truth test were removed,’ CAIA president and chief executive Tim Kennedy told the magazine. ‘Activists with deep pockets who don’t live or work where our salmon farmers live and work are trying to drive policy decisions in Ottawa that would cancel people’s livelihoods using a storyline based on old data and false information.'”
Alaska has, to date, been able to get away with selling its farmed salmon as “wild-caught,” but with Canadian net-pen farmers getting increasingly aggressive about defending their production, it would appear that Alaska’s questionable labeling might also come under fire.
None of the hatchery salmon in Alaska are produced for conservation purposes, either. There are no failing salmon runs hatcheries are needed to save.
This level of sport, personal use and subsistence catches would constitute 0.4 percent of the hatchery harvest. The non-commercial harvest is low in part because of the limited demand for pink salmon among sport, personal-use and subsistence fishermen.
Commonly called “humpies,” the littlest of the salmon are scorned by many in Alaska, but are widely farmed because they are the cheapest and easiest of salmon to raise. They need spend no time rearing in freshwater before their release to the ocean.
Feeding young Chinook, sockeye or coho salmon for a year or more before they can be sent to sea is costly, which is why state-established production goals for ranched salmon set in 1983 have never been met.
The goals were set after Alaska voters approved bonds to build the state’s hatchery system, but before those hatcheries were turned over to the private non-profits because the state found them too costly to operate.
Over the course of the last 40 years, the goal has been met once for coho. The goals for chum, sockeye, and Chinook, the most valuable and desired of Alaska salmon, have never been met.
The pink goal of approximately 16 million has, however, been vastly exceeded. Even-year pinks and odd-year pink salmon are distinctly different fish, and even-numbered years have historically produced pink returns less than half those the size of odd-numbered years.
Despite this, the state reported a harvest of nearly 26.8 million hatchery pinks in 2022. The state report for 2021, meanwhile, put the hatchery pink catch at 57.1 million.
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I do seem to be hearing many more questions about the Alaska aquaculture/fisheries model lately, so thanks for writing this article. I wonder if anyone has looked into how much sea lice is brought back to coastal areas from millions returning hatchery salmon (especially adult pinks that can host several dozen sea lice each), and how that may be influencing wild juvenile salmon smolts either directly or indirectly. Much attention given to this in Canada (some would argue too much), but little/none done in Alaska. Don’t want to open that can of worms, perhaps?
Interesting