Escape of Non-native Salmon - Farm Phase-Out Plan

Hi Amy

A couple of comments on your Dec 29 article on farmed salmon: https://www.timescolonist.com/escape-of-non-native-salmon-on-b-c-coast-puts-farm-phase-out-plan-in-spotlight-1.24041570.

First: Google this to get the links on the John Volpe posts I have done: ‘fishfarmnews.blogspot.com - John Volpe, 97%’. I did about half a dozen. In addition, the overall story is best told by a post on David Suzuki’s site, which you can also find.

Volpe found that of the rivers he swam on Van Isle that of those with multiple species of wild salmonids, they had adult and progeny of farmed salmon in 97% of the cases, a shocking level.

DFO and as you note, fish farms claim the opposite: that farmed fish can’t survive escaping. Worse, DFO attempted to kill Volpe’s work by, at the last minute, refusing to give him Atlantic Salmon for his work and refusing to authorize him to do in-river work they had already agreed to. You can find this in my posts.

It is also the case that on the Atlantic coast, that any river within, I believe, 50KM of a farm, has farmed salmon. This is a worse result as the only species of salmon in the east are Atlantic Salmon.

Second: the escape work that Volpe and others have done suggests an escape/leakage rate of .3% to 5%. Using the absolute lowest rate, one can calculate the per crop escape/leakage number of fish: .003 X 85 farms X 600,000 fish/farm = 153,000 fish. None of these fish are reported to DFO, so when Mowi reports 20,000, the overall picture is far worse than you quote: ‘demonstrates the urgent need to’ get fish farms out of the water because 153,000 fish escape/leak each crop, and no one reports this reality.

The escape/leakage rate is calculated in this post: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/03/otto-langer-on-farmed-fish-escapes.html.

This post gives you the Van Isle rivers that Volpe et al have swum: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2017/12/atlantic-salmon-in-van-isle-rivers.html.

DC Reid