Tuesday, 26 December 2017

Cypress Island, WA, Multiple Salmon Escapes

It is common knowledge, through news reports in summer of 2017, that the Cypress Island fish farm cages broke up with 305,000 Atlantic salmon, and with 200,000 escaping in WA, some being found as much as 250 km away in Campbell River, BC, and Tofino on the outside of Van Isle. And showing up in the Fraser and Skagit rivers on both sides of the USA/Canada border.

What is not common knowledge is an earlier farm collapse, spilling Atlantics into Puget Sound in 1996: "On 2 July 1996, high tidal flows destroyed 7 of 10 net pens at a salmon farm near Cypress Island, Washington. Of 101000 Atlantic salmon that were killed or escaped, 35000 fish had body weights ranging between 0.4 and 0.5 kg, while the remainder weighed between 2.7 and 3.7 kg. From 4 July 1996, and for the remainder of the summer, Atlantic salmon were caught in a test fishery that
operates annually at the entrance to Juan de Fuca Strait (Fig.1). "

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