Wild salmon are being driven to extinction in American river basins. But conservationists are fighting back. Writer Oliver Balch tells the incredible story to Grin.
After years on ice, the champagne in the Klamath River Basin is primed to start flowing. Come the end of next year, a decade-long fight by conservationists and native tribes to encourage salmon back to the river will start in earnest.
Yet clouds hang over the pending celebrations. Despite the US government agreeing to remove four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, many residents still fear for the salmons’ future. Their fears come from an unexpected source: hatcheries.
Ostensibly, hatcheries exist to maintain or restore fish populations. The process is straightforward: eggs get collected, the offspring are raised in a protected environment, and, once grown, the fish are released into the wild. What can go wrong?
Lots. So argues a hard-hitting new documentary directed by San Francisco-based filmmaker Josh ‘Bones’ Murphy. Entitled ‘Artifishal’, the 80-minute film details how the release of millions of hatchery salmon into the US river system is pushing wild stocks to extinction.
Wild salmon runs are being “exterminated by hatchery production” asserts one of the film’s protagonists, Ken Belcomb, a conservationist at the Centre for Whale Research in Puget Sound, Washington.
The reasoning is twofold. First, the released fish compete with their wild cousins for food and habitat. Second, hatchery stock inter-breed with wild species and thereby weaken their genetic make-up, which is perfectly adapted to their particular river environment.
As the film’s closing scene notes, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has decided to keep open its Iron Gate Hatchery on the Klamath River after the dams’ removal. More than that, plans are in fact afoot to extend it.
“There’s no right way to do the wrong thing,” says Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor apparel brand, Patagonia, which financed the documentary.
To cite just one example, in New Hampshire, over one million salmon were released into the Merrimack River every year for 38 years. In 2013, the program’s final year, a mere 22 adult fish returned from sea to spawn. The hatchery annual budget was in the region of US$750,000, making the each returnee worth $34,091 a piece.
Together with a coalition of conservation charities in the US and Canada, Patagonia is calling on its customers to lobby for an end to artificial salmon propagation and to get involved in river restoration instead.
This combination of ending hatcheries and improving river ecosystems has already been tested in parts of Montana and Washington, resulting in a recovery of wild salmon stocks, the film states.
Hatchery representatives are reluctant to go on record. Neither the federal-level US Fish and Wildlife Service nor the California Department of Fish and Wildlife responded to requests to comment on the film (which, incidentally, also lambasts the sector for using taxpayers’ money to effectively “subsidize” commercial and recreational fishing).
Conservation biologist Dwayne Shaw is one of the few willing to put his head above the parapet. Executive director at the Downeast Salmon Federation, a charity that uses hatcheries to restore Maine’s endangered salmon stock, Shaw admits that raising fish artificially has frequently been “tried and failed” in the past.
“Historically, we moved fish in from all over the continent and maybe even beyond into stocking programs, and that failed because either the rivers were so ecologically broken or because we were trying to rebuild with non-native fish from elsewhere,” he explains.
Yet, when done right, hatcheries can serve the purpose they are intended for, he maintains. And by ‘right’, he mostly means sourcing breeding stock from the same river into which they will be released and raising them in conditions as close as possible to their future environment.
This more “naturalized” or “rewilding” model is one that has met with success in the UK city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Under the long-term direction of pioneering conservationist Peter Gray, the Tyne’s returning salmon stock rebounded from the low hundreds in the late 1970s to around 30,000 today.
Yet time is of the essence. Of the 150 and more rivers along the East Coast of the US and Canada that were once home to wild salmon, only a dozen or so are “secure”, according to Shaw: “The rest have either gone extinct or they are heading that way.”
Unlike the majority of existing hatcheries, naturalized hatcheries tend to be located on rivers. They also produce far fewer juvenile fish or ‘gametes’ than standard large-scale facilities. Both factors argue against the situation changing rapidly.
One implication is that recreational anglers may have to hold back a while and wait for embattled wild populations to bound back. But what about US consumers who enjoy the occasional salmon steak? Should they cut back as well?
There is good news and bad news here. The bad news is that, contrary to what the labelling might say, most ‘wild’ salmon sold in the US are neither wild nor from the US.
Over 90% of seafood consumed in the US is imported. In the case of salmon, most comes from Europe or South America.
As for their provenance, although most imported salmon is reared in the sea or lakes, they are hardly swimming around freely. Instead, they are reared in huge nets operated by commercial fish producers, where they are liable to disease and infection.
The good news is that the US is home to a fledgling but growing alternative: land-based aquaculture. Essentially, this sees salmon raised from eggs (as in a hatchery) and brought to maturity in controlled, self-contained conditions.
In the most advanced of these land-based facilities, over 98% of all the water used is recycled, ensuring pathogens are eliminated and water use is limited.
For Gabe Watkins, a spokesperson for Riverence, a company that produces rainbow trout (part of the salmon family) using such a system, the advantages in terms of conservation are clear.
“The best way to protect wild salmon is to stop killing them. That’s step one. Then step two is to produce them in a way that is sustainable,” he states.
The sustainability claims of land-based fishing aren’t water-tight. On the plus side, there is no way that farmed fish can find their way into the river system and compete with wild stock. Less positive is their energy use, which can be high when water needs to be pumped or its temperature artificially controlled.
Brandon Gottsacker, president of Superior Fresh, which operates a 40,000 square-foot fish farm in rural Wisconsin, admits that energy represents “one of our biggest costs”. To mitigate the operation’s energy-related emissions, the firm uses natural gas for all its heating needs. It also plans to introduce solar-power capacity in the near future. Furthermore, a sizeable part of its energy-related emissions are offset by the fact that Superior Fresh’s salmon don’t need to be flown half way round the world, he adds.
The sustainability credentials of Superior Fresh’s produce, which is available in supermarkets and restaurants across the mid-west, is enhanced by what else happens on the facility: namely, the re-use of nutrient-rich, recirculated water and fish waste to produce vegetables.
“We have a six-acre greenhouse that produces the equivalent of 43,000 heads of lettuce every day, all from organic inputs . . . so we’re creating revenue from the nitrogen and phosphorous that is being created by the fish,” Gottsacker says.
As ever, the pending question is whether such an approach can reach a scale that makes it a viable alternative to net-farmed, imported salmon. At present, there are only a handful of land-based salmon producers in the US.
Hampering the sector’s expansion are high set-up costs, coupled with consumer doubts about the quality of farmed fish. Neither factor is insurmountable, according to Johan Andreassen, co-founder of Atlantic Sapphire, whose 10,000 ton-capacity fish farm in Miami makes it the largest land-based salmon producer in the US.
The ability of land-based farms to raise fish in a controlled environment, free of the parasites and viruses common to open-net conditions, results in fish that are healthier, tastier and less likely to die, he argues.
“We are proving that this approach works and that our cost profile is going to be in an area in which this is economically viable and can compete with net-pen farming,” he states.
Consumers will take some convincing that a fish that has never seen the sea can match the taste of a wild salmon. Conservationists are hoping they can be persuaded. Because if not, the chance of seeing a salmon in the wild, let alone eating one, is set to get slimmer by the day.
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