Mr Salmond, there is no such thing as "sustainable" farmed salmon!

Dear All

I was distracted by a brief trip to the Continent from commenting on what may well become one of the biggest eco-disasters to strike these beautiful waters – quite apart from the fact that the Scottish government looks set to get into bed with a regime whose human rights record has left a lot to be desired for decades. Read for yourselves what someone much better qualified than I has written:

Andrew Flitcroft, in: The Observer, 20^th February 2011 – quoted in the Guardian:

You're so wrong about salmon, Mr Salmond

The new trade deal with China has terrifying implications for our wild fish stocks

Visiting trade delegations do not often register on my radar. However, the high-level Chinese visit to Scotland in January was different. Apart from the inevitable "gift" to the hosts, consigning two hapless giant pandas to a life of incarceration in Edinburgh Zoo, a new trade deal on Scottish farmed salmon between the two countries was signed, allowing access for the first time to the vast Chinese market.
First minister Alex Salmond crowed that the Scottish fish-farming industry may need to double salmon production to satisfy Chinese demand. The announcement a few days later that China was halting the import of Norwegian farmed salmon (China's retaliation, according to the Norwegian press, for the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to the imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo) lays Scottish government open to the charge that it is in effect supporting repression.
But cynical politics aside, the implications of increasing significantly, let alone doubling, farmed salmon production in Scotland are terrifying. Surely it is recklessly irresponsible to contemplate any increase without first rectifying the dire existing problems, particularly the spread of deadly sea lice, caused to juvenile wild salmon and sea trout in the west Highlands and Islands by current production levels. There is little doubt that the situation is set to deteriorate.
But first, for readers who are not familiar with the war between the salmon farming industry on the one hand and those trying to protect wild salmon and sea trout runs on the other, here is a brief summary of the problem. Marine cages of hundreds of thousands of farmed salmon are breeding grounds for millions of sea lice; these parasites feed on the mucus, tissue and blood of their farmed salmon hosts. The companies employ a range of measures using highly toxic chemicals to combat the lice, in order to reduce the damage and stress caused to their captive hosts.
However, juvenile wild fish, which migrate from the rivers to the sea each spring, are simply not designed to cope with more than the odd louse. As these fragile young fish, known as smolts, run the gauntlet past the fish-farm cages conveniently placed on their migration routes down the sea lochs towards the open sea, they are ambushed by the unnaturally high concentrations of lice. The attachment of more than 10 lice is almost invariably fatal. The fish are literally eaten alive although death is usually hastened by secondary infections, which gain access through open wounds made by the grazing lice.
This is the environmental calamity that the salmon farming industry and Scottish government is so determined to deny. Make no mistake – there is no such thing as "sustainable" farmed salmon, no matter what the evocative packaging on the supermarket shelves tries to convey. Indeed, all such packaging should be approached with scepticism. M&S's Lochmuir salmon comes from an entirely fictitious location.
Now evidence is growing that salmon farms in Scotland are fast losing the battle against sea lice, mirroring the situation in Norway, where the head of the Directorate for Nature Management (the equivalent of Scottish Natural Heritage) has just called for a 50% cut in salmon production because, for the second year running, the average number of lice on each caged fish in several regions of Norway has exceeded the official limit of one mature female louse or five lice in total with increasing resistance to chemical treatment. He said that such a cut might not be enough to save Norway's fragile wild salmon stocks as: "The problem is very big and it is not under control."
It is perhaps no wonder the salmon farming industry in Scotland is so sensitive on the sea lice issue. Witness their gagging of Scottish government last year to prevent publication of Marine Scotland's farm inspection reports. Analysis of these reports, obtained by Salmon and Trout Association's Guy Linley-Adams under FOI, confirms instances where sea lice have been completely out of control, necessitating early slaughter on several farms.
Compared to five years ago, Scotland's salmon farms are using far greater quantities of pesticides to kill sea lice on farmed fish as the chemicals become less and less effective and the lice develop immunity. Some are adopting desperate measures and two managers of a Shetland farm have just been charged with animal cruelty following the death of more than 6,000 farmed salmon last August.
Given these problems, it is galling that Scottish government continues to trot out the same tired mantra that salmon farming is "sustainable" and there is no proven damage to wild fish populations, aided and abetted by the nauseating spin peddled by the Scottish Salmon Producers' Organisation, the front for the Norwegian companies that dominate the industry in Scotland. Most galling of all is the prospect of an even bigger industry.
There is one ray of hope. Solicitor Guy Linley-Adams, acting for the owners of the Ullapool river, has just submitted a formal 80-page complaint to the EU, detailing the failure of the authorities to designate an appropriate number of west coast Scottish rivers as Special Areas for Conservation for salmon under the EU Habitats Directive.
The complaint also details the failure of the Scottish government to rein in the salmon-farming industry to provide proper protection for wild Atlantic salmon and sea trout in the west Highlands and Islands. The gloves are starting to come off.

Andrew Flitcroft is the editor of Trout & Salmon

More food for the debate on scallop harvesting (post no 2)

Dear all

The debate continues and your blogger, for one, is learning so much. Methinks we will need to have a public meeting to share visual material and knowledge, insights and ideas.

For now, here's the next contribution – items in angular brackets have been inserted by Margaret Powell-Joss, your blogger.

Is Scallop dredging Sustainable?

by David Ainsley

In his recent posting, D[.F.] states that he is fishing the same grounds that he fished 30 years ago and making a profit. He argues that this means that he is fishing sustainably – but he has not considered the damage that dredging causes to seabed communities and the evidence of declining scallop spawning stock biomass and recruitment.

Scottish scallop landings by UK vessels have risen from less than 2000 tonnes in 1974 to around 8-10,000 tonnes from 1994 to 2008. The 2008 figures are about 10% down from the peak.

The spawning stock biomass was just over 5000 tonnes in this area (North West management area) in 1999 but in 2007 – the last year for which figures are available – the SSB was at the lowest historic level of just over 1000 tonnes.

Both West coast of Scotland scallop management areas are shown in red on the chart on the report as spawning stock biomass and recruitment are declining [ref (1)].

But measurements of spawning stock biomass only go back to 1981. We know that seabed communities have been subject to damage by steam trawlers since the 1870’s – dredging started much later. In order to decide how healthy a stock is, we need to know what the historic stocks were before fishing began.

One way to do this is to look at all the old records, and the book The Unnatural History of the Sea by Prof. [Callum] Roberts takes this approach [ref (2)]. One scientific study estimates that only 10% of the fish swim in European waters that were present in the year 1900. But by 1900 stocks had already been industrially fished, so the real figure may be 5%.

Another approach is to close areas to fishing and monitor what happens to stocks. By 2006, the first Isle of Man closed area, protected for 20 years, had scallop biomass levels at more than 60 times those shown prior to protection [ref (3)]. Stocks have since continued to increase. There is strong evidence that this has led to greater returns from adjacent fishing grounds.

So catches remain high, but spawning stock biomass and recruitment are at dangerously low levels.

Why has this happened? There are a number of reasons:-

- In the early days, solid dredges were used in open areas like Luce bay. The solid dredges gave way to Newhaven dredges with spring-loaded tooth bars designed to work rough ground. This, combined with advances in electronics, allowed boats to work previously un-fished grounds.

- In the old days Decca was used for navigation. It relied on a land-based signal and, like mobile phones, there were many areas where it didn’t work well. Now we have stunningly accurate GPS, plotters, side-scan sonar, 3-D echo-sounders, systems such as Roxanne, which reveal very bit of suitable ground, allowing all those little bits nobody knew about before to be fished out. Scientists call it technological creep - in recent years it has been more of a technological gallop.

The scale of the ecosystem damage is obvious to those of us who have dived here [in the Firth of Lorn and further along the West coast of Scotland] over the last thirty years. Until the mid-eighties we never used to see sea-beds damaged by dredgers, but – as technology improved over the years – the dredgers worked right up to (and sometimes over) the reefs. It is now difficult to find a piece of seabed suitable for dredging that has not been dredged. To find such areas, you need to go to Norway, where they do not dredge and have miles of mussel beds and other healthy sea-beds, supporting healthy ecosystems – if anybody is interested, I have film to show this.

Dredged sea-beds are less efficient as settlement areas for small scallops and as nursery areas for fish. Thus dredging affects fish stocks and, by association, the porpoise, dolphins, seals and whales which feed on them.

What scientists call the Alee effect applies: as scallop spawning stock biomass declines, the individuals left become generally spaced further apart. There comes a point at which the individuals are so far apart that the gametes rarely meet, and recruitment declines, as is the case now.

As David [Frazer] correctly pointed out, the recent closed areas in the Isle of Man were closed with the participation and support of the fishermen. This is because they can see that having closed areas works to restore stocks. A survey in the Isle of Man showed that 85% of respondents are in favour – or strongly in favour – of Marine Protected Areas. There has also been huge support for the Marine Conservation Society’s campaigns, Your Seas Your Voice and Marine Reserves Now.

There is a legally established Public Right to Fish, and it follows that the public have a right to require that their fish stocks are fished in a sustainable way. If the damage caused by dredging happened on the side of the road where people could see it, there would be an outcry. People are now becoming aware of the state of the seabed and fish stocks.

We currently have an unfair situation where the very large percentage of the owners of the stocks who wish to have areas closed to allow fish and shellfish stocks to regenerate currently have only 0.006% of UK seas fully protected.

Dredgers are decent people. But if there had never been dredging, there would almost certainly be opportunities for other fisheries, and the seabed would be much healthier, as in Norway.

The Firth of Lorne is closed to dredging, but divers – who harvest scallops without damaging the seabed – can still operate. If an area were closed to all fishing, scallop stocks could rebuild and seed other areas, as happens in the Isle of Man.


Ref (1) Steven Keltz, Nick Bailey (Sarah Heath, ed), Fish and Shellfish Stocks, Crown copyright, 2010. marinescotland science. pp63-66. [link takes you to pdf version for download]

Ref (2) Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea: The Past and Future of Humanity and Fishing (Gaia Thinking), Washington/Covelo/London: Shearwater Books/Island Press, 2007.

Ref (3) BD & JS Beuchars-Steward, Principles for the Management of Inshore Scallop Fisheries Around the UK, 2007. [link takes you to quickview of pdf document]

An open email on Scallop and Tangle Net fishery management

David Ainsley sent this open letter on 10 Nov 2010 to Richard Lochhead, MSP, Jim Mather, MSP, and Kenneth Gibson, MSP:

Dear Cabinet Secretary,

I refer to the article in the Sunday Times 07.11.10 by Charles Clover [The Scalping of Scotland in the Scallop War]. In this article he expresses concern at "how unhealthily close the Scottish Nationalist administration is to the most over-capitalised, destructive and irresponsible parts of the fishing industry".

The Isle of Man is a model for how fisheries should be managed. It has a network of closed areas to allow scallop stocks to rebuild themselves after years of overfishing. The first closed area has been in place for 20 years and is produces 100 times the number of young scallops per unit area as compared with adjacent fished areas. The closed areas have been seen to be so successful that there are now six of them, designated with the support and involvement of the local fishing industry.

By contrast Scotland's fisheries are poorly managed, with nomadic fleets of dredgers moving into an area, causing a great deal of damage and then repeating the process elsewhere.

It is no surprise that the Isle of Man Administration seeks to protect its waters from some of these boats, as no doubt we would if the positions were reversed.

Voters are becoming aware of the problems caused by overfishing and media attention on the subject will continue to increase.

The loss of fish and shellfish is now so obvious, it is no longer credible to deny that a major problem exists.

Scottish Government represents the interests of all the people of Scotland, who have a public right to fish, and hence a right to call for their fish stocks to be managed sustainably. These interests are not the same as the vested interests of the fishing associations which disproportionately represent the damaging towed gear sector.

Last year at the CFP [EU Common Fisheries Policy] meetings in Brussels, there was a move by Scottish Government to call for the reopening of the tangle net fishery off the West Coast of Scotland. The fishery had been closed as one of the measures under the Cod Recovery Plan. The decision was for the fishery to remain closed and to be reviewed in 12 to 18 months. The inshore fishery targets Crawfish, a heavily overfished species. It also produces high levels of by-catch of porpoise and seals. It is probable that the majority of Scottish voters would not be in support of the reopening of a fishery which earns nobody a living and kills porpoise and seals.
I attach fuller information on the subject [David Ainsley's report: Scottish Porpoise under threat – see below].

Please keep me informed of when the subject will be considered again, and what the Scottish Government position will be.

It is not just fisheries, but the entire ecosystem including iconic wildlife and hence tourism, which flourish when areas are protected.

Yours faithfully,

David Ainsley

[MPJ comments: diver, underwater nature explorer, author of Scottish Porpoise under threat (2010?) – for your own copy of the report, please leave a comment with your co-ordinates on this post and we'll get back to you. Needless to say, we will not publish your details!]

 

*****

PS by MPJ, your blogger:

See also 

• David Jolly, A Dirge for the Bluefin Tuna, 29 Nov 2010

• Frank Pope, Fishermen cheer as stocks of North Sea cod increase by 5 per cent, 27 Jun 2009

• Charles Clover, Whose sea is it anyway?

• Charles Clover, Tuna commission takes limited action to save sharks but fails again to ensure recovery of bluefin tuna, 28 Nov 2010

• Charles Clover, The End of the Line. How overfishing is changing the world and what we eat