Atburðir sumarsins í Noregi sýna okkur svart á hvítu hvað mun gerast fyrir íslenskan villtan lax ef sjókvíaeldið fær að halda áfram hér og vaxa einsog þessi skaðlegi iðnaður berst fyrir með fulltingi SFS, sem er algjörlega óskiljanlegt.
Samtök fyrirtækja í sjávarútvegi ættu að vera í fararbroddi þeirra sem verja firði landsins og villta lífrið fyrir skaða af þessum hrikalega iðnaði.
Í umfjöllun The Guardian segir:.
Scientists have been warning of the rapidly declining North Atlantic salmon population for years, which in Norway has shrunk from more than a million in the early 1980s to about 500,000, a drop largely linked to the climate crisis. Now, the latest figures show Atlantic salmon stocks are at a historic low. Experts say the species is at imminent threat from salmon farming, which has led to escapes (including of sick fish), a dramatic rise in sea lice, and could result in wild salmon being replaced entirely by a hybrid species.
Torbjørn Forseth, a salmon researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (Nina) and the head of the Norwegian scientific advisory committee for Atlantic salmon management, says wild Norwegian salmon could become extinct.
“We are replacing wild salmon with escaped farm salmon,” he says. “That’s in the long term a major threat because then you lose all these local adaptations.”
Each of Norway’s 450 salmon rivers has its own salmon which have adapted to the specific conditions of the local environment. “If that is replaced with a hybrid between wild and farmed salmon then you are losing something very, very important.”
While the broader factors linked to the climate crisis are not something that Norway can quickly do something about, the human-made impact of fish farming is something that could be swiftly acted upon, says Forseth. He is calling for a completely different approach to fish-farm management, separating farmed and wild fish populations. Open-net farming at sea has, he believes, reached its “biological limit”.
This year’s salmon collapse – from the south-east of Norway near the border with Sweden to just north of Trondheim – is unlike anything he has ever seen in his 25 years of studying Atlantic salmon. “I’m worried for the future,” he says.
… Vegard Heggem, the former Liverpool player turned salmon campaigner for Norske Lakseelver (Norwegian Salmon Rivers), says salmon farming needs to switch to closed containment and he wants to see a government-imposed deadline on doing so as Canada has done in British Columbia.
Consumers also need to be better informed about how their salmon is farmed, he says. “For Norway it [the salmon] is like a symbol species for the country. It’s our panda. It’s just not acceptable as a nation to allow the wild salmon to be turned into a museum item – it’s there but you can’t enjoy it, you can’t touch it, can’t fish it.” …