3 Unfortunate Salmon
Charles Kingsley, the nineteenth-century British novelist and keen angler, had never heard of the health benefits of eating fish with substantial amounts of long-chain, unsaturated Omega-3 fatty acids. Still, he rated the noble salmon a peerless dish. ‘Of all Heaven’s gifts of food’, he announced in The Water-Babies, ‘the one to be protected most carefully is that worthy gentleman salmon, who is generous enough to go down to the sea weighing five ounces, and to come back next year weighing five pounds, without having cost the soil or the state one farthing.’1 Kingsley’s indignation over the ingratitude that those who benefited from its largesse displayed toward the incomparable (Atlantic) salmon fed into a national debate over the fish’s future in the 1860s. At this time, regardless of the different species, there was just one sort of salmon: the wild one (broadly defined as a population maintained by natural spawning for at least two full generations). Soon, a second form would be added as a technocratic solution to the salmon’s floundering numbers was sought: the semi-wild fish born and raised in a hatchery and eventually released into rivers. Since the 1960s, a third type has emerged and quickly become the dominant variety in the Atlantic world: the fish farm’s domestic salmon. A fourth kind has recently been made but is not yet on general release: the genetically modified salmon. Yet in some future scenario, we may revert to just one kind of salmon. This time, though, the sole salmon could be the fourth salmon, an ingenious man-made gift of food. This chapter looks at how we, as a species, have mistreated the first salmon – Kingsley’s heavensent wonder food – and compromised its watery world.
THE LEAPER’S FALL
Many rivers in northwest Europe once bristled with salmon. The picturesque little wine towns of St Goar, Goarhausen and Bacharach on the scenic gorge of the middle Rhine, for instance, were once thriving salmon villages. These fisheries had dwindled substantially by 1900, however, due to dredging and, on the upper Rhine, dams. Yet postcards still displayed the time-honoured motif of the salmon fisherman tapping the deep pool beneath the hulking mass of the fabled Lorelei.2 That the Rhine’s Swiss headwaters were prime spawning grounds is suggested by the ‘Salmon Stübli’ (taverns) with their salmon-shaped brass signs in Stein-am-Rhein. And one of Basel’s traditional dishes is Saumon à la Baloise – fillets served in a white wine sauce with sautéed Spanish onions.
Saumon à la Baloise, though, is no longer made with local fish. The last Rhine salmon was caught in 1958. And the only major river system in northern and western France that has retained even a residual breeding population is the Loire-Allier. But the squeeze on the fish predates industrialization. A leading English authority on animal husbandry, Leonard Mascall, concluded in 1590 that none cares for the preserving of the commonwealth; whereby they cannot increase, nor yet suffer to grow’.3 Degraded habitat combined with ruthless harvesting placed the fish under considerable stress in early modern times in rivers like the Seine. Organic residues such as manure and the effluent from slaughterhouses, breweries and tanneries deoxygenated freshwater well before textile mills, steel plants and coal mines contaminated the salmon’s environs.
Efforts to alleviate these abuses are as old as the infringements themselves. The desire to protect salmon fisheries precipitated what was possibly the first anti-pollution legislation. In 1466, the Dublin Corporation acted against tanners who washed their leather in the Liffey, imposing a three-quarter pence fine for each offence.4 Forty-shilling fines for flax manufacturers were decreed in Scotland in 1606 because the laying of lint in lochs and burnes is . . . hurtful to all fishes bred within the same’. And according to the provisions of a Scottish act of 1685, millers who captured smolts in creels or raised dams were punishable by a month in prison, irons or stocks, to be fed on bread and water at their own expense.
Heavy industrial pollution delivered the coup de grace. In the mid-1700s, Warrington on the north bank of the Mersey was ‘famous for salmon fishing’, huge quantities being despatched 180 miles by stagecoach to London twice a week.5 A century later, a few decades before the first shipments of tinned Pacific salmon were arriving up the river, the Mersey’s salmon were practically gone. The Thames, in Izaak Walton’s view, produced the best-tasting salmon in England.6 In the late 1700s, one of the most familiar sights on the bank of the Thames in the village of Barnes, just 13 kilometres upstream from London Bridge, was the salmon fisherman with his net. Yet not a single gleaming salmon on the marble slabs at Billingsgate fish market, Dickens bewailed, was locally caught in 1860. In the fifteenth century, the Westminster Abbey monk, John Flets, had blamed declining numbers in the Thames on divine disapproval following the lapsing of the accustomed offering of tithe fish’ that fishermen formerly paid to the Abbot of St Peter’s, Westminster (the ministers of riverfront parishes, who wanted their own share, prevented compliance).7 But Dickens was clear about the basic problem: too many big nets. To convey just how slim the chances of escape were, he drew a vivid analogy:
Imagine Rotten Row a salmon stream, the good citizens salmon. Four P.M., the spate and the fish running up, a great net is spread at the three arches at Hyde Park–corner, another great net from the statue to the Duke’s house, nets half way across the Row every fifty yards . . . add to this, fierce and cunning ogres fishing for us from the walk with rods and hooks baited with devices the most tempting to our nature. How many of us would get up to Kensington Gardens . . . one out of a thousand would get away safely. Rotten Row would soon become depopulated, Kensington Gardens spawnless, and the race extinct; the ogres would give up preserving our race.8
Stories abound about the last salmon caught in the Thames. Some claimed it was taken near Maidenhead in 1821. Others related that the final one, a 20-pound (9 kg) fish, was captured near Surly Hall, above Windsor, and sold to King George IV (then living at Virginia Water) for a guinea a pound. (The king apparently sought one, in vain, for his coronation in July 1821.)9 A rival source brings the solemn occasion forward to 1833 (yet concurs that a monarch, William IV, bought it).10 Sightings on the lower Thames were reported in 1860 – the first, some claimed, for 20 years. But the river was effectively salmon-less.11
‘The cry of “Salmon in Danger!” is now resounding throughout the length and breadth of the land’, Dickens announced in 1861. He predicted gloomily that ‘a few years, a little more overpopulation, a few more tons of factory poison, a few fresh poaching devices and newly-invented contrivances . . . and the salmon will be gone – he will become extinct’.12 These widely shared concerns had prompted the appointment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry (1860) into the ‘Salmon Fisheries of England and Wales, with a view to increasing the supply of a valuable article of food for the public’. The ensuing legislation banned the use of lights and spears (an activity known as ‘leistering’ – see the next chapter), small-mesh nets and so-called fixed engines (stationary nets); required fish passes for mill dams and gaps in weirs at least a tenth of the stream’s width; established closed seasons and catch limits; appointed a board of conservators for each river, and two inspectors for England and Wales.13
One of the early inspectors was Frank Buckland, a pioneer in the art of salmon culture (artificial propagation) who characterized his all-consuming vocation as being ‘to attend to, and carefully watch, the interests of the King of Fish’.14 Buckland hand-stripped eggs and milt from ripe salmon, incubated them in hatcheries and raised the young fish (some of these operations even took place in his own kitchen in central London). Later, when they had reached the alevin and parr stages, he released them into the Thames, hoping to boost the production of young salmon. (Artificial propagation of salmon began on a larger scale with chinooks at a hatchery on California’s McCloud River, a tributary of the Sacramento, in 1872.)
To strip their eggs for artificial propagation, salmon are trapped in a hatchery at Astoria, Oregon, 1941. |
In the early evening of 18 April 1870, when informed by telegram that a sprat fisherman had netted a female salmon at Gravesend Reach, Buckland thought his efforts had been rewarded (though he was open to the possibility that she was a Dutch salmon that porpoises had diverted from the Rhine). He rushed down to the hotel where she was ‘lying in state’ on a large pewter dish and the assembled throng (to his horror) was debating how to cook it. He bought this exceedingly beautiful ‘treasure’ (weighing 10.5 kg and between five and seven years old) for two pounds and six shillings. Having garnished it with seaweed, wrapped it in newspaper, and placed it on a board, he and a friend bore it like a small coffin to the nearest station. On his way home from his local station, Buckland passed the Athenaeum Club and took great pleasure in showing it off to a friend who was sceptical about the Thames’s prospects as a rejuvenated salmon river. The next morning, he took his fish to Windsor Castle to show it to a keen fellow angler and naturalist, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg, husband of Princess Helena Victoria (and Ranger of Windsor Great Park).15
The next stop for this overnight piscine celebrity was the Museum of Economic Fish Culture that Buckland had established at the South Kensington Museum (the forerunner of the Science Museum). In addition to a stuffed seagull with a copy of the act of Parliament for the preservation of seabirds in its beak and a mouse trapped by an oyster, the cramped premises featured hatchery apparatus, the equipment needed to transport salmon ova to Australia, a working model of a salmon ladder down which water flowed and up which young salmon swam, and a number of plaster casts of what Buckland called poissons célèbres – including a Rhine specimen weighing 31 kilograms.16
Though Scotland’s salmon rivers remained in better shape than England’s or Wales’s, pollution blighted even the most renowned waters. Another iconic Scottish product, whisky, was a major culprit. Twenty-seven distilleries sat on the banks of the Spey in the 1890s and an indignant Augustus Grimble relates how he was fishing one day just below Aberlour Burn, where a distillery was sited, when a sudden discharge of ‘burnt ale’ (a waste product) turned clear water a muddy yellow with ‘horrid-looking froth floating on the surface and varying in size from a saucer to the top of a small tea-table’. This concoction was lethal to fry, parr and smolt. Legal action against the distillers, initiated by the Countess Dowager of Seafield, resulted in stiff fines.17
In addition to pollution and over-fishing, deforestation and agriculture have contributed to the wild salmon’s plight. Denuded soil washes into rivers and ruins the crystal waters and gravel beds of spawning grounds. Erosion also transforms the cool waters of a deep channel with stable banks, good shade and decent pools into a warm, shallow and braided stream. Sheep and cattle exacerbate riverbank erosion, while arable farming aggravates run off. Add the cocktail of farm slurry, silage, chemical fertilizers and the pesticides from sheep dips (which also wipe out the insects on which young salmon subsist) and it is not surprising that rivers flowing through today’s post-industrial cities can be considerably cleaner than their rural stretches.
The salmon’s European fate was replicated across the Atlantic and, eventually, though by no means as devastatingly, in the Pacific. Whatever the quantities involved might have been before Europeans arrived, North America’s Atlantic salmon fisheries were in decline by the 1850s. New England’s commercial fishery ended in 1948. Canada’s more or less shut down for good in 1998. But the recovery in stocks that many advocates of a ban had predicted has not materialized. For young, post-smolt salmon comparable in size to mackerel, that tend to swim close to the surface, are intercepted en route to their summer feeding grounds by trawlers fishing at the surface for herring, mackerel and blue whiting. Pacific stocks, exploited later, held out longer. At the time of Lewis and Clark, the annual number running up the most important American salmon river – the Columbia – is reckoned to have been between 10 and 15 million.18 In 1866, when catches on the Columbia were first recorded, 15,000 chinook were taken. By 1870, the number had risen to 367,000. The peak catch was 3.6 million fish in 1918. By the mid-1930s, when the first dams were being erected, numbers had plunged to 1.4 million.
Salmon have faced obstacles in the shape of weirs for centuries. But a string of gargantuan dams such as Bonneville, built for reclamation and hydro-electricity, were an entirely different proposition. The fish ladder (invented in the 1830s) was hailed as a palliative. But big dams (Grand Coulee on the Columbia rears up 150 m) do more than block passage. The reservoirs behind them inundate spawning grounds. The propeller blades of turbines rub off scales and abrade fins. ‘Gas bubble disease’ killed 5 million fish on the Columbia-Snake in 1971 alone.19 Young salmon entering the waters behind dams also have difficulty locating the current, resulting in disorientation, wasted energy and, sometimes, failure to migrate. The confused and the delayed often fall prey to the fish that flourish in the still, fetid waters.
The first big dam on the Columbia River, the Bonneville Dam, completed in 1938; 40 miles east of Portland in the Columbia River Gorge. |
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A fish recorder for the United States Army Corps of Engineers looks into a counting station fishway at the Bonneville Dam, c. 1943.
Fish Ladder at the Bonneville Dam on Columbia River, Oregon, 1953. Visitors gaze down from a bridge, in the hope of seeing salmon using the facility designed to allow then to circumvent the massive concrete barrier that blocks their migrations.
In the ultimate act of empathy with the damned salmon, four Idahoans (the ‘Sockeye Swimmers’) swam 724 kilometres down the Salmon and Snake rivers in July 1995 to publicize the ordeal of the juvenile sockeye smolt. Over the Salmon’s free-flowing section, they clocked up a brisk 48 kilometres a day. When they entered the orbit of the first dam on the lower Snake, though, their progress stalled. In the 48 kilometres of slack water behind Lower Granite Dam, they managed only ten daily kilometres. Those who march in ‘Save-the-Dams’ rallies insist that any negative impacts can be readily remedied by installing ‘fish-friendly’ turbines, barging and trucking young fish around dams, or sending them down a gigantic waterslide called a removable spillway weir. Increasingly, though, the wild salmon’s champions urge a more radical solution: removal of dams to restore the river conditions under which the fish have spent virtually their entire evolutionary history.
Human agency is not always responsible, however, for the fish’s misfortunes. The cause of the Columbia’s disastrous runs of 1877, 1891 and 1926 was El Niño, which temporarily reverses the customary (east to west) direction of surface winds in the equatorial Pacific. By bringing warmer water toward the South American mainland, El Niño interferes with the currents that deliver nutrients from lower levels, encouraging the growth of tiny organisms on which fish feed. The best known consequence is the collapse of the Peruvian anchovy fishery. But on rare occasions (including 1877, 1891 and 1926), El Niño’s effects extended to the northeast Pacific, depleting nutrients and bringing summer drought. In addition, warm-water species such as hake flooded north, preying on juvenile salmon. Even as late as the 1920s, virtually nobody outside Peru had heard of El Niño, let alone understood its repercussions. So just as Americans blamed human actions for the precipitous declines associated with these developments – commercial fishermen, sportsmen, Indians and dam operators indulged in a bout of mutual recrimination – they credited artificial propagation for subsequent recoveries. The real explanation, though, was the resumption of normal conditions in the equatorial Pacific. ‘Nature’, Joseph Taylor explains, ‘took away what nature would eventually give back.’20
DOWN ON THE FISH FARM
Artificial propagation, as the El Niño episode suggests, was often hailed as a wonder cure. But some advocates were aware of its limits. As early as 1873, Buckland informed The Times that the best remedy was to open up ‘as many miles of spawning ground as possible’, because the fish ‘know their own business much better than we do’.21 Juvenile salmon that had endured a baptism of natural fire were far more street-wise than naïve young hatchery salmon often released far too early. (By the 1910s, young fish were kept in feeding ponds until they stood a better chance of survival. But much of their feed – horse meat, tripe and condemned pork and beef – was inappropriate and promoted disease.) In a 1992 study comparing their behaviour with that of hatchery fish in an aquarium that simulated a stream, canny wild salmon hugged the edges, retreating to cover after feeding, and swam near the bottom to avoid currents. By contrast, hatchery salmon exposed themselves to predators by swimming near the surface in packs and wasted energy fighting currents. ‘A fish that acts that way in the wild’, explained researchers, ‘is going to be a dead fish.’22 The disease resistance that wild stocks build up over generations in a particular stream also demonstrates superior ‘stream smartness’.
The next loudly trumpeted panacea was the logical extension of artificial propagation: salmon farming. Responding to the demise of its wild stocks in the mid 1960s, Norway pioneered salmon cultivation in floating pens anchored by cables in protected fjords. Since the first Scottish venture at Lochailort (1969), nearly every suitable site on Scotland’s west coast has become occupied. Enterprises sprouted up along both Canadian coasts in the early 1980s, but especially in British Columbia. In the early 1990s, this increasingly profitable industry spread to Chile (now, after Norway, the world’s largest producer).
But set against the economic benefits – farmed salmon are worth more to the Scottish economy than lamb and beef output combined – are the consequences for their wild counterparts. In the early days, Norwegian and Scottish fish farmers promoted their product as the salvation of remaining Atlantic stocks because it would make commercial fishing unprofitable. They were certainly right about the future of commercial fishing; by 1981, the Atlantic’s farmed production had exceeded its commercial catch.23 But any wild stocks that may have been reprieved as a result have been adversely affected in other ways. Meanwhile, the farmed salmon’s own quality of life has become a tendentious issue too.
When they turn into smolt, farmed parr are transferred from freshwater hatcheries to seawater cages. Though hardly the proverbial sardine in a can, each adult (roughly three-quarters of a metre long) has the equivalent of a bath tub of water (according to the Compassion in World Farming Trust). The animal welfare expert, Philip Lymbery, observes that their tendency to circle endlessly in dense shoals ‘could well be reminiscent of caged big cats pacing in small zoo pens’.24
Diseases and parasites are no strangers to the wild. But packed cages create ideal conditions for their spread in epidemic form. Furunculosis is a fatal affliction characterized by red spots containing bacteria that rot blood vessels and tissue and damage kidneys. Farmed Atlantics of Scottish origin have transmitted it to wild chum migrating past pens in Echo Bay, British Columbia. (Keeping farmed and wild salmon apart has also proved difficult because farmed stock routinely escape their open topped cages during storms and when seals damage the netting.) Farmed salmon afflicted by an even deadlier virus, Infectious Salmon Anaemia (ISA), often betray no external signs of illness apart from lethargy. ISA, which causes haemorrhaging in the liver and kidneys, has no known cure. It thrives in shallow water with high fish densities and an initial outbreak in Scotland in May 1998 resulted in mass disinfections and quarantines and the slaughter of 4 million fish. This calamity generated the first wave of bad publicity for salmon farming in the mainstream British print media. The cover of the satirical magazine, Punch (16–29 January 1999), featured the head of a wild spawning male with menacing hook jaw and enlarged teeth, emitting a ‘Moo’. The caption read ‘Salmon: The New BSE’(a reference to the recent outbreak of so-called mad cow disease). Within a year, ISA had spread to wild salmon. Many farmed salmon, related Punch, had become sick and distressed, ‘swimming feebly near the bottom of their pens, their eyes bulging and blood-spotted, and their bellies swollen’. The article also hinted at a rather too cosy relationship between government and industry, resulting in a lack of political will to force powerful multinationals that delivered welcome jobs to remote communities to clean up their act.
Punch also raised the question of the transfer of sea lice.25 Farm escapees communicate the lice that flourish in teeming cages (eating mucus, scales, skin and, sometimes, the flesh itself) to wild salmon (which usually shed their complement on reaching fresh water). The antibiotics, pesticides and fungicides administered in feed to combat diseases and parasites seep into the marine food chain through faeces and excess feed that sinks to the bottom. These pollutants hit shellfish particularly hard but farming disadvantages other members of marine ecosystems in other ways too. In British Columbia, underwater sirens to deter the seals and sea lions that salmon pens attract scare whales from their customary feeding grounds (and may actually be attracting rather than repelling predators – the ‘dinner bell effect’).
Tremendous quantities of faeces leach into waters where seabound wild smolt rest and feed. Natural forces struggle to break down the deluge of ammonia-rich excreta, a problem aggravated by the poor flushing systems of the farms’ loch-head locations. Farm filth eventually creates oxygen-depleted ‘dead zones’ on the sea bed. In his critique of modern food production methods (2001), the veteran BBC broadcaster, John Humphrys, recounts a scuba dive he took in a loch – the site, a year previously, of a salmon farm. There was nothing but a thick carpet of black sludge. As he tries to walk along the bottom on his hands, Humphrys becomes engulfed in a cloud of muck.26
Organized opposition in Britain first emerged in the late 1980s through the Campaign for Real Fish. Poor flavour was the initial objection. ‘Farmed salmon has a distinctly muddy taste’, remarked Egon Ronay (president of the British Academy of Gastronomes), ‘whereas wild salmon really tastes like salmon.’ A Sunday Times article in 1987 referred to the travesties of artificial colouring and ‘smoking’ by dipping in smoke-flavoured chemicals, and noted calls for labelling to distinguish wild from farmed and to indicate the presence of additives. The feature also decried the sorry state of fish deprived of movement in over-crowded pens.27
In stark contrast to the fish’s popular image, the reality for the vast majority of Atlantic salmon is captivity. The mighty king of fish has fallen to the lowly status of mass-produced living commodity ridden with disease and chemically dependent (‘Wild Salmon Don’t Do Drugs’ is a bumper sticker slogan popular among commercial fishermen on North America’s Pacific coast). Some farmed salmon are also effectively blind (chronic cataracts) and deformed – a condition known as ‘humpback’, which lends them the appearance of carp rather than the humpback (pink) salmon and is attributable to the high temperatures applied to incubating ova to hasten hatching.
The ‘remarkable journey’ of farmed salmon, recorded in a Private Eye cartoon (6–19 February 2004).
Those that survive the high mortality rates of caged life bear the marks of incarceration. Farmed escapees can be distinguished from wild Salmo salar by examining the tails and fins, which are much smaller due to lack of exercise; the only leaping a farmed salmon does is part of a vain effort to shake off lice. Tails and fins are also frayed and abraded by in-fighting and friction with cage bars. Penned salmon have blunter noses due to close confinement. Critics also publicize the health threat to human consumers from the accumulation of carcinogenic and other toxic substances in farmed salmon. These, they claim, taint breast milk, depress the immune system and affect the neural tissues.28
A watchword for critics is authenticity. Supplanting the wild with the farmed, according to Ron Greer, a former scientist at the Scottish Executive’s freshwater fisheries research laboratory, is like knocking down Edinburgh castle and replacing it with a concrete replica’.29 For many critics, the hallmark of fakery is the colour of farmed flesh. Whereas the flaming red of the most commercially desirable wild salmon reflects their diet of krill, the farmed fish’s hue derives from colourants added to feed. For market research indicates that consumers associate colour with flavour and freshness. Enter the designer salmon. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Hoffmann-LaRoche, has devised a colour chart (2003) called the SalmoFan, which resembles the paint charts available at decorating stores. The 33 shades range from bold bubble-gum to a very subtle rose. Just as a young girl can choose her favourite pink tone for her bedroom walls, a salmon farmer can do the same for his fish. Recent Norwegian experiments confirmed consumer preference for the deepest coloured fillets. Consumers, observed the Norwegian Food Research Institute, ‘are willing to pay significantly more for salmon fillets with normal, or above normal redness’.30
The salmon industry insists that its colourants (it objects to the term dye) are no less natural than the carotenoid pigments in the crustaceans that colour wild salmon. Yet they are synthetically prepared in a laboratory and potentially harmful. Responding to studies indicating that prolonged exposure to canthaxanthin can cause pigments to accumulate on the human retina, the European Union issued a food safety edict in 2003 that imposed a three-fold reduction in the permissible amount in feed. And, whatever we call them – pigments, colourants or dyes – without them farmed flesh would be an unappetizing grey and, therefore, as the Norwegian study concluded, ‘difficult to market’.
Salmon farmers believe that consumers would be sick of their product long before it made them sick. Yet controversy persists. American research published in Science (9 January 2004) reignited public debate. The authors claimed that amounts of hazardous chemicals such as organochlorine pesticides and dioxins – long-lasting compounds that become concentrated as they move up the food chain – are significantly higher in farmed salmon than in wild. They pinpointed diet as the main reason for the difference.31 Salmon differ fundamentally from other intensively reared animals in that they are carnivorous. In their aquatic feedlots, these swimming livestock are fed pellets consisting of fish meal, ground up raw fish, and fish oil fortified with vitamins. The fish in question are those usually too small for human consumption (so-called ‘industrial’ or ‘forage’ fish) that dwell on the ocean-floor, where they absorb residual toxins before factory ships vacuum them up. Wild salmon are lower in contaminants because they eat smaller, less contaminated creatures like shrimp and krill. (Another bumper sticker from the Pacific Northwest proclaims that ‘Real Salmon Don’t Eat Pellets’.) In former centuries, employment contracts in Europe stipulated that apprentices and servants should not be fed salmon more than three times a week. Today, some researchers recommend that consumers limit their intake of farmed salmon from certain countries to between three and six portions a year.32
To restore public confidence in their battered product, Scottish Quality Salmon, a trade organization representing two-thirds of the Scottish salmon farming industry, launched a £3 million advertising blitz in the British press in July 2004. One advert showed salmon cages floating in a loch as calm as a swimming pool. The impression of a spacious and tranquil setting was reinforced by the information that 98 per cent of a fish pen is occupied by water and that most pens are equivalent in volume to two Olympic-size swimming pools. ‘To produce such high quality salmon’, ran the caption, ‘you must have the right ingredients. Fresh air, clear loch water and great highland views.’ ‘These unique ingredients’, Scottish Quality Salmon proclaimed, ‘can only be found in the great surroundings of Scotland.’ The second advert, featuring a rugged looking young fish farmer cradling a salmon, sent the message that the fish – and you, the consumer – are in safe hands. The slogan summing up the product was ‘Naturally they’re the best’.
The Salmon Farm Protest Group quickly contested this claim to naturalness, citing the use of colourants and medicated feeds and the inadvertent presence of toxins. It also challenged the claim of uniqueness on behalf of Scottish farmed salmon. Salmon farming is a global industry based in Norway and Holland. And Scotland’s salmon farmers employ the same methods as their counterparts in other countries – where there’s also plenty of stunning scenery, fresh air and glorious views.
Whether farmed or wild, oily fish like salmon are the only significant source of Omega-3 fatty acids, which, it has become well known since Kingsley’s time, help combat heart disease. Recent studies suggest that these fatty acids can also assist in maintaining optimal brain functioning, fend off Alzheimer’s disease and breast cancer and relieve arthritic and menstrual pains. And, according to the very latest claims, they possess anti-depressant qualities, can alleviate dyslexia, hyperactivity and other learning difficulties in children, mitigate the effects of alcohol and tobacco, and protect skin against ultraviolet rays. In view of these touted benefits, many fish eaters feel that the advantages of eating farmed salmon substantially outweigh the risks. In October 2004, a BBC1 series that explored various public fears dedicated an episode to farmed salmon (‘Should I Worry About . . . Farmed Salmon’). Having considered the pros and cons, the presenter, Richard Hammond, decided that he would definitely not be worrying. Nor is he alone. Despite a temporary blip early in 2004 in the wake of the Science report, Britons ate 86.4 million salmon meals between March and May 2004, a 20 per cent rise over the same period in 2003.33
Farmed salmon are a potential source of biological as well as chemical pollution. Pointing out that farmed stock are bred for rapidity of growth, uniformity of size and passivity (docility is clearly an asset in crowded pens), fish farmers in the early days of their industry pooh-poohed fears that their fish would damage the genetic viability of wild fish through interbreeding. An escapee’s survival rate was likely to be minimal, they claimed, because their sheltered existence rendered them easy prey. It transpired, though, that farmed Salmo salar was tougher and more adaptable than predicted. ‘We were told they wouldn’t escape. They escaped’, reflected Jennifer Lash, director of the Living Oceans Society, a conservation organization in British Columbia’s Broughton Archipelago, in 2001. ‘We were told they wouldn’t survive in the wild’, she continued. ‘They survived. We were told they wouldn’t get upstream. They got upstream. We were told they wouldn’t reproduce. They’ve reproduced.’34 Hybridization may erode the wild fish’s homing instinct. Some fear that the possibility of a homogenized salmon strain emerging through ‘genetic swamping’ has been strengthened by the use of the domesticated version of Salmo salar as farm stock in British Columbian and Chilean operations.35 These worries may be overblown, though, for farmed Salmo salar seems to be at sea at sea. The stomachs of escapees caught in trawl nets contain less food than those of their wild counterparts while scale analysis suggests that their oceanic growth rate compares badly.36
THE ULTIMATE TECHNOLOGICAL SALMON
Though they gain weight faster than their wild counterparts – round-the-clock cage lighting provides a further boost to growth rates – farmed salmon still lag behind their main commercial competitor: broiler chicken. Whereas farmed salmon need a couple of years, poultry arrive on supermarket shelves within six weeks of hatching. The next stage in the making of salmon is therefore approaching. Aqua Bounty Farms (Massachusetts) is gearing up for commercial production of what would be the first genetically modified fish species in North America by applying for a permit to the US Food and Drug Administration.37 Any approval granted at national level has international implications because the transgenic salmon differs profoundly from all other salmon and might also escape. Containing a growth hormone gene extracted from the chinook salmon, ‘super salmon’ (or ‘frankenfish’, as their opponents dub it) can grow two to three times faster than regular farmed salmon. The end product could be a fish eight times bigger than its closest relative.
Those who are cooking up transgenic salmon insist that they will be exclusively female and completely sterile. Subjecting eggs to heat creates an extra (third) set of chromosomes so that females can only produce other females (already common practice in trout farming). The resultant sterility maintains flesh quality (which usually deteriorates with the onset of sexual maturity) and converts feed into flesh more efficiently. GM salmon’s pioneers have also devised a cheap and apparently foolproof scanning method to verify sterility in individual triploid fish before they leave the hatchery. But what if a male triploid should slip through the safety net? Transgenic males of inordinate size could displace wild males in the breeding stakes and also hog food supplies. According to the computer modelled ‘Trojan Gene Hypothesis’, just 60 genetically engineered fish among 60,000 wild fish would bring species extinction within 40 generations. And if we end up with just one salmon type – a sort of McSalmon – should that population itself crash, there will be no salmon of any kind left.
The probability that this terrifying scenario will actually materialize is hard to calculate. After all, the reference point for the Trojan Gene Hypothesis is a fish quite unlike any salmon – the genetically modified medaka. This small freshwater fish from Japan matures in 56 days and breeds daily until it dies. Besides, transgenic salmon accustomed (like farmed salmon) to being fed might prove spectacularly inept at foraging. Even if capable of recognizing a likely meal, they would lack the necessary hunting skills and energy reserves to pursue it.
ORGANIC SALMON
To eliminate the danger of contact between the farmed and the wild, environmentalists urge the adoption of fully contained, solid-wall pens made of concrete or plastic with their own waste collection facilities. Yet only (even more expensive) land-based closed tanks can deliver total genetic security. Meanwhile, others promote what they consider to be the only acceptable face of salmon farming (available since 1999): organically reared fish. Like free range hens, these enjoy more lebensraum than conventionally farmed fish (though any form of farming frustrates the migratory instinct). Their cages, as well as being larger, are situated in the more open waters of the Orkney Islands and Shetland, where Atlantic Ocean and North Sea merge; coping with high waves and tidal currents, the fish get a good workout (whereas sea lice suffer). Vigorous exercise develops firmer flesh and lowers saturated fat content. As a result, devotees claim, organically raised salmon tastes much better than conventional farming’s flabby product.38 Open-water location also flushes away excrement and food residues more efficiently.
Extensive as opposed to intensive rearing also obviates the need for pesticides, which organic methods prohibit as well as growth promoters and antibiotics. Small ‘cleaner’ fish called wrasse are sometimes deployed to nibble off sea lice. Organic standards also prohibit synthetic pigments. Organically farmed salmon flesh is therefore rather pale, though crushed prawn and shrimp shells – the only permitted feed additives – impart some of the pinkness that consumers expect. Nonetheless, organic methods cannot guarantee absolute freedom from toxins. Mercury, for example, is no respecter of any kind of salmon.
THE SALMON’S RETURN (LONG LIVE THE KING)
Not all prospects for salmon are bad, however. In the 1930s, the British novelist Henry Williamson expressed the hope that, despite the pollution of once ‘pure’ rivers, ‘one day salmon will be leaping again in the Thames, that Salmo Salar, the Sea Leaper as the Romans named him, will jump once more in the Pool of London, and play around the piers of the bridges’.39 Williamson did not live to see the rehabilitation of British rivers, many of which are cleaner now than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. As salmon are an ‘indicator’ species – the state of a local population being as reliable a yardstick of a river system’s general health as any – the demise of Britain’s heavy industry has been great news for the fish.
Salmon are leaping again in the River Don in the centre of Sheffield, reinvesting that riverside space, ‘Salmon Pastures’ (most recently a coal-tipping yard), with meaning for the first time in a century and a half. They have also reappeared in the Mersey, the Clyde and the Tyne.40 These encouraging developments are mirrored on the continent. The Rhine was nicknamed the Sewer of Europe in the early 1970s but, in 1990, a sizeable salmon was caught in a tributary. The Salm, which gave the fish its name, has not yet been recolonized. But the efforts of a restoration campaign (Salmon 2000) bore fruit in 1994 with evidence of natural reproduction on the Sieg, a direct tributary of the Rhine. The returning fish represent a combination of farm escapees, members of residual populations and strays.
Similar restoration campaigns are underway on the Loire-Allier and across Britain. A group of landowners, anglers and conservationists in southwest England established the Westcountry Rivers Trust in 1994 to grapple with the deep-seated causes of decline in Devon. Fencing off large stretches of riverbank has protected them from trampling livestock and farmers have curbed their use of pesticides and fertilizers near banks to reduce run-off. Obstructions have been removed and streamside woodland thinned to create dappled shade – the optimum conditions for the tiny algae (diatoms) on which fry feed. Still, Williamson’s dream remains unfulfilled. A few salmon return to the lower Thames each year. But locks prevent them moving upriver. And even if river conditions could be rendered more or less perfect, this would still be the easy bit. Looking after the salmon’s interests in their sprawling oceanic realms presents a much more formidable challenge.
In South Wales, in addition to improving riparian habitat, the Wye and Usk Foundation has bought out the drift netters that operate in the Severn Estuary (1999). This is not only a boon for returning and departing salmon but also good for sport fishermen. Yet others besides sportsmen and commercial fishers have sought a place at the great table to guarantee (and maximize) their slice of the salmon pie. The next two chapters explore how securing, granting, protecting and implementing access to the esteemed salmon has been a deep-seated source of bitter human confrontation.