A Salmon Sleuth's Disturbing Find

"You want to do what?" asked an incredulous plant manager.

"I would like to look through all the guts taken out of the Atlantic salmon, please." By now I was used to being considered odd.

He gave me a chair and a hair net and instructed the forklift operator to place each tote beside me. A wealth of information lay in those heaps of intestines and hearts and I didn't have to go chasing off after it; it was all here, immobile and available. The age and sex of the fish could be read from the condition of the gonads, the crispness of the spleen's edges reported some measure of health, the stomach gave up the fish's last meal and the adhesion of one organ to the other revealed whether that fish had been vaccinated or not. Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and industry stated that escaped farmed salmon were too domesticated to eat wild food; here was the proof one way or the other.

'Dead fish talk'

None of the fish caught in the first week during the escape in Tribune Channel had a trace of wild food in them. Some had pellets in their stomachs. One week later 2 percent had attempted to feed. While some were experimenting with alder catkins, chips of wood and styrofoam, four out of 497 fish examined had fed successfully, capturing both herring and young salmon. When the fishery opened one week later I was turned away from the processing plant. In an email labeled "dead fish talk" I had made the mistake of reporting on the wild food I had found in their stomachs.

I cursed my stupidity for letting an important avalanche of data slip away. I really wanted to know what the fish had found to eat one week later, in their third week of freedom. Finding wild food is the most crucial test any animal invading a new ecosystem must pass. One fisherman after the next declined me access to his now valuable catch: Atlantics were bought and counted as cohos, the Pacific species they most closely resembled. I did not blame or press them; coho prices were huge compared to the extremely low price of the pink salmon, their target species. Then Calvin Siider called, "You can have my whole Atlantic catch, Alex."

Not giving him time to change his mind, I darted off to rendezvous with his vessel in Knight Inlet. I felt badly for his young deckhand losing part of his wages, but the hard set of Calvin's jaw made it clear he wanted his fish to go to science and the fish were slurped into my boat. Calvin's fish completed the story. Upon release, none of the farmed salmon I looked at were eating wild fish. Seven days later, 2 percent were eating something including fish and, after 21 days of freedom, 14 percent had passed the test with shrimp, herring, sticklebacks and other unidentified animal life in their stomachs. They could survive. Stolt figured they had lost 33,000 fish. This meant 4,620 could potentially be on their way to colonizing the West Coast.

'Fairy tales'

By the second opening, officially called a "pink" opening, but dubbed the first ever Atlantic salmon opening in the Pacific, several fishermen tied one end of their nets right to the Sargeant Pass fish farm and made an interesting catch.

While the vast majority of fish were large swollen-looking creatures with enormous fat bodies accumulated around a small head, these other fish were fusiform and sleek. The masses had soft greasy flesh that could be scooped and balled like mashed potatoes; the others had firm muscular flesh. While the masses had none to very few of the normal Atlantic salmon spots, these others were more typically coloured with dark black spots over their heads and bodies. And they were almost sexually mature, while the others were years away from spawning. The males had 'kypes,' or curved lower jaws, and their gonads were heavy with sperm, while the females were ripe with large eggs.

It was my impression that these fish likely came from other farms elsewhere on this coast and were hanging around the outside of the nets, making a living by eating the pellets that drifted through the mesh. These fish were almost ready to find a river, and there were several good rivers nearby. These were the escapees most likely to spawn and they set the stage for species invasion. DFO said farmed salmon wouldn't escape. Then when fishermen began catching them, they said they couldn't eat wild food. Next they prophesized they would not spawn. Then when juvenile Atlantics were found in the rivers, they said, "Oh well none of this matters anyway, they won't establish." Why would anyone but a fool keep believing these fairy tales? I suspect feral Atlantic salmon cluster outside many a farm and suspect DFO agrees because they refuse to task a gill-netter to go look.

Knee-deep in Atlantics

Some days I returned to my float with so many Atlantic salmon in my boat I was wading knee-deep through them. I looked like a commercial boat after a night of gill netting, though my catch was perverted: Atlantic salmon pulled from Pacific waters. One evening I was so exhausted from collecting, measuring, weighing, gutting, preserving stomach contents, and taking DNA, bacterial swabs, scale samples and pictures that I could not bring myself to deal with the carcasses. As I dragged myself up the ramp, a fleeting thought crossed my mind, "What about the raccoons?" I have a coon problem. A family of these masked bandits climbs into my boat nightly and eats everything soft enough to bite, including my daughter's crayons. I knew the next morning there would be farmed fish scattered across my float, but I was simply too tired to do anything about it.

The next morning, I strode down to the dock, rubber gloves up to my elbows ready for clean-up detail, but to my surprise there were no fish on the deck. I looked at the situation closely. One Atlantic salmon had been pulled half-way out of the tote and dropped. Its head bore the puncture wounds of a raccoon's bite, but in very short order this raccoon must have decided this fish was not food.

I sat crouched by that fish for a long time in disbelief. "It must be the smell of them," I thought, for I was now very familiar with their smell and it in no way resembled that of wild fish. Farmed fish have a cloying odour closely resembling the pellets they eat; a smell which eventually caused me to burn some clothing. Finally, I had a good laugh and headed back, gasping for air. "My" coons preferred crayons to farmed salmon. What would the restaurant crowd think of that?

Alexandra Morton is co-founder of Raincoast Research Society and the Broughton Archipelago Stewardship Alliance.  This is excerpted from her essay in A Stain Upon The Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming, published by Harbour Publishing.

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