While the hew and cry over genetic variants of Mother Nature’s finest will be played out in boardrooms and courtrooms, rest assured that our knack for bullying the environment, and then crapping on the survivors is largely intact.
It seems humans and their reared salmon have finally managed to bridge the wide gulf between wild stocks and their pen raised cousins, by introducing a hatchery caused disease into the wild ..
.. Salmon Anemia, no known cure, and a yen to trod upon whatever we don’t gill net …
The virus that causes the disease originated in the mid- 1980s in Atlantic salmon fish farms in Norway and spread to Scotland, Canada and the U.S. Farms in Chile also were infected, probably via imported eggs.
– via Bloomberg
This time it’s Mother Nature’s turn to gasp, as our disease affects both Pacific and Atlantic salmon, and therefore is the perfect, and final solution to the “salmon menace.”
Finally, some fish farms, particularly in British Columbia, should be relocated away from the migratory corridors of wild fish, so that any anemia outbreak that might occur there would be less likely to spread.
… and while they’re pointing fingers and debating across international borders, the lesson to be learned was already known to us fish chasers, “scrub your boots and don’t crap where you eat.”
I’m looking for a partner to help start a constrictor farm in the Everglades. I hear they taste like turkey and are the length of a table for serving purposes. I can no longer tollerate this Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy my brother insists on publishing during Thanksgiving.
Yikes Igneous!
I can only imagine how intolerable KB’s paradigm of looking at life through rose colored glasses must be for his immediate family.
My sincere condolences to you and your family.
Any sign of weakness or infirmity and they’re on my fly box like a pack of dogs. In my house, Joy is a phaser set on stun …
Being from BC this is an issue that hits close to home. Fish farms may provide a large quantity of protein in a world that needs renewable food resources but the risks to wild stocks are simply too great to locate these farms near migratory paths of our already threatened wild stocks.
Science is slowly building a compelling case that the location and spread of these farms needs to be managed carefully, given the contagion they can spread to fish swimming nearby.
Terrestrial or blue water cages remain options, but locating pens near migration routes and estuaries are adding to the burden…