
Atlantic salmon swim far and wide after fish farm collapse - curtis
http://kuow.org/post/atlantic-salmon-swim-far-and-wide-after-fish-farm-collapse
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curtis
I thought this part was interesting:

> _More recently, Atlantic salmon have escaped fish farms in Washington by the
> thousands, apparently without gaining a finhold in the wild:_

> * _1996: 107,000 fish swim free after an anchor line fails on a salmon farm_

> * _1997: 369,000 fish escape while a salmon farm is towed away from a toxic
> algae bloom_

> * _1999: 115,000 fish break loose from a net-pen during a strong tidal
> current_

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electic
It is too bad the reason for why they never take hold is never really outlined
in the article. Is it the environment? Or some other species that prevents
eggs from taking hold?

Either way, sounds like most most of these will also share the same fate.

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cptskippy
Are Atlantic salmon not migratory like Pacific salmon?

Pacific salmon are born in fresh water rivers and travel downstream to the
river. When it's time to mate, they migrate back up fresh water streams they
were born in to mate and then die.

If you were farm born and raised then where would you migrate to mate?

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ksec
Good Question. But do they not get fished / killed before they mate?

As one of the point of farming them is that dont get to fresh water and
decrease the risk of parasites.

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appleiigs
The article mentions the farmed fish spread parasites because of the cramped
spaces. I’m assuming a greater chance of parasites in farm than in the wild?

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bochoh
So when I go to the market and get "Wild Caught Salmon" it really could be
farm raised salmon that escaped and were subsequently fished in the vicinity?

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jonnathanson
I would be highly suspicious of anything calling itself "wild" and "Atlantic"
in the same breath. There is almost no wild Atlantic salmon fishery left in
the United States and Canada. It's all farm raised. Occasionally you can find
legitimately wild Atlantic catch in Scotland or Norway. But wild catch makes
up less than 1% of all Atlantic salmon on the market.

So if you want wild salmon, start by looking for a Pacific label, a listed
species, or a regional designation of some kind. That's still not a guarantee,
but it narrows things down quite a bit.

For what it's worth, 90% of all salmon on the US market is farmed. So if
you're at a restaurant or a BBQ and aren't sure what you're getting, you're
probably getting farm-raised Atlantic salmon.

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KGIII
There are still some wild Atlantic salmon, if you don't mind a bit of a drive
and hike.

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aurizon
No river scent cues to follow, they will probably scatter and not establish
any sort of breeding population - if they have any fertility left?

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Jesus_Jones
If just say 10 of them were swept into the same river and eventually stream,
they would have a chance at it. It's just the luck of numbers so far. After
all, there's no law of nature that says atlantic salmon are only in the
atlantic.

~~~
jonnathanson
Right, but genetic diversity of the breeding population would be very low,
making the population itself very fragile. And that's assuming the spawn
survive their first season. (Most young salmon spawn do not survive, and those
not native to the local waters face unique challenges.)

This doesn't seem to be a case where the invading species gains an immediate
upper hand in its new environment. (Cf., the rampant python population in the
Florida Everglades.) In this case, the invading Atlantic species faces stiff
and probably superior competition from the various Pacific salmon species,
which are every bit as big and fast, and which fill the same ecological niche.
Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon. It also
knows the territory, including where and what to hunt, and its wild instincts
haven't been dulled in a fish farm.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager on the native Pacific populations over the
scattered pockets of farm-raised exotics nearly 99 times out of 100. Barring
human involvement, of course. If we hunt the Pacific species out of existence,
or damage the environment beyond recognition, all bets are off.

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LeifCarrotson
> Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon.

They don't have to be bigger and faster, with precise 'local knowledge' to be
dangerous to an ecosystem. They merely have to be _different._

Perhaps their small size will cause them to escape the attention of normal
predators, or their lack of knowledge of what to eat causes them to decimate
some species that Pacific salmon don't eat.

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jonnathanson
Atlantic salmon aren't "different" enough from the various Pacific salmon
species to occupy their own niche in the Pacific Northwest. If the big ones
are too big for you, there are also medium-sized species and smaller species.

The Atlantic salmon is a big, predatory fish that needs to eat a lot of
smaller species to stay alive. In the Pacific Northwest region, pretty much
every species that could sustain the Atlantic salmon is also preyed upon by an
extant, native salmon variety of some stripe. If the Atlantic salmon possessed
some sort of advantage in obtaining one prey species or another, then there
you go, there's a niche it can adapt to. Thus far, we haven't seen that
advantage materialize, or the niche appear.

I apologize if some of the nuance of this point was lost in my "bigger,
faster" figure of speech. My tl;dr here is that exotic species don't just
magically, automatically win in a new environment simply because they're
exotic. To thrive, their exoticism needs to confer some specific competitive
advantage within the local ecosystem. I'm struggling to see what that
advantage is for the Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Northwest, simply because
the oceans and waterways in that region are teeming with very, very similar
competitors.

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Aloha
Based on this article, I would not be left feeling too concerned that Atlantic
salmon escaped in the pacific northwest. It seems this isn't the first time
its happened, and the many previous releases have come to basically nothing.

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fiftyacorn
Is this treated as an environmental crime?

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NegativeLatency
People freak out in the moment, usually there's some kind of fine, and then
nothing really changes.

Almost like financial crime.

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oh_sigh
We keep hearing how farm raised fish are genetically inferior...so let's put
them to the test.

Do salmon need estuaries to find their way back to their breeding grounds?

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ddmma
looks like that crazy fish really did it as in Shawshank Redemption

~~~
jxramos
\---come on guys, let's make a swim for it! (as in run for it)

