Spring 2002
A Dying Breed
by Tam Huyah
There are more fish than ever in the fish market, but more and more commercial fishermen are going out of business.
In the 1990s, farmed fish started commanding more of the fish market and wholesale fish prices fell. Farmed fish are cheaper to harvest than wild fish, which means fresh fish at lower prices for consumers. It also means fewer jobs in the commercial fishing industry and unforeseen environmental effects.
Shannon Moore began fishing on Lummi Island in the early 1970s. He attended Washington State University and later Western Washington University before finding his calling on the open waters. He purchased his own business in the late 1980s, but was forced to quit when it could no longer support him.
Fishing was more than just a job to Moore — it was a way of life. The work was intense, but after just two seasons he earned enough income to support himself through the off-season. The price of fish was good in the late 1980s; Moore was able to sell his sockeye for $4 per pound in 1988.
Then, during the 1990s, the price of fish started declining.
“The price really went to hell in about 1997 – it started doing a spiral,” Moore said. “What was happening was the farmed fish had finally found a foothold and they were able to take over the world market share. They did that overnight. In a matter of 10 years they went from a world market share of maybe 15 percent to 60 percent or more today.”
The drop in prices forced fishermen either to diversify their catch or quit. Foreign countries, such as Norway and Chile, flooded the market with farmed fish, driving down the price even more.
“Prices are lower then they have ever been,” said Pete Granger, program leader for Marine Advisory Services. “Anybody can buy salmon now. It used to be a luxury item.”
For example, Bristol Bay fishermen sold sockeye for only 40 cents a pound last year, Granger said, one-tenth of what Moore received a decade earlier.
Granger, a Bellingham resident and aquaculture advocate, supports fish farming because it provides fish to consumers at lower prices. Competition with imported farmed fish drives costs down even lower.
In Washington state there are two types of fish farm: salt water net pens that raise Atlantic salmon, and upland facilities, that usually grow trout in pond-like enclosures.
Atlantic salmon start their lives at hatcheries before getting transferred to net pens. They are harvested once they reach 6 to 10 pounds, depending on market demand. By feeding the fish a high protein diet of open-ocean fish, farmed fish grow twice as fast as wild fish.
“A lot of environmentalists say we’re killing all these fish in the food chain to feed fish higher in the food chain, but we’re using fish that people wouldn’t eat otherwise,” Granger said. “They’re in a regulated fishery, so we’re not using up the entire resource.”
The industry is currently studying alternative feed options to animal proteins, which would eliminate the need for feed fish and reduce costs.
“It could be within the next five years that fish feed is primarily vegetable protein rather than animal protein,” Granger said. “We’re getting slowly away from dependency on fish meal, which would be good.”
Wild salmon are pink due to the foods they eat in the ocean, such as krill and shrimp. Farmed salmon do not have pink flesh because they are only given fish meal. A pigment is added to their feed to give them a more natural looking pink color, which appeals to consumers.
“There are two of them we can use legally, and the FDA approves them,” Granger said. “So the fish will ingest it and the flesh becomes red just like it would have if it was eating natural food.”
The fish may also be given antibiotics, which are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
“There’s an old misnomer that farmed fish have antibiotics in their flesh when they’re pulled out, and we can’t do that,” Granger said. “It’s against the law to do that. Once we have fed them some feed that has antibiotics we have to take them off that feed for 180 days to purge the flesh of any residual antibiotic.”
Despite the artificial enhancements people can’t get enough of farmed fish.
“You can see why consumption is going up in the country – the fish is good and it is cheap,” Granger said. “The restaurants and grocers just love it because it’s much better quality, much more uniform quality. Every fish is the same, which can’t be said for the wild fish.”
The only type of salmon raised in Washington’s net pens are Atlantics because they grow faster and are more resistant to stress, Granger said. The Atlantic salmon’s flavor is mild and the flesh is soft, but that may be due to the fish not swimming as much, Granger said.
The flesh is oilier, but humans benefit from the consumption of omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for the heart. Fatty acids lower the risk of heart disease by discouraging plaque build-up on arterial walls, preventing platelets in the blood from clumping together, and driving down blood thickening triglycerides.
“A lot of wild fishermen will tell you that wild fish have higher omega-3 fatty acids then farm fish because it doesn’t eat natural fish,” he said. “That’s not true because our fish feed has fish oil and fish meal from real fish, and it is very high in omega-3.”
Fish feces, however, is a problem in net pen operations. The feces accumulates around the pens, killing normal sealife beneath them.
“There’s no way to describe it, it’s just a dead zone,” Granger said. “There are millions of acres in the Puget Sound. We don’t have a heavy concentration of pens; I think we can live with 40 acres of (dead zone) right below our pens.”
Despite farmed fish’s growing popularity, it’s unlikely that more fish farms will be built because of high permit costs.
While no new sites are currently planned, Granger said he hopes the industry will continue to grow.
“West of Port Angeles, (next) to the entrance of the Straight of Juan de Fuca, there’s a stretch of land where there’s very few people,” he said. “It’s potentially good for aquaculture. If any new production might come, it might be out there.”
Granger’s vision is exactly what Anne Mosness is fighting against.
Mosness fished with her father in Alaska after graduating from Western with a degree in sociology and psychology. She is the founder of the Go Wild Consumer Education Campaign, which provides consumers with information about the danger farmed fish pose to wild stocks.
Mosness said hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon have escaped from their net pens in the last few years. Farmed salmon that escape from their net pens can wipe out native salmon stocks by feeding on the eggs of native salmon. Their presence alone may deter Pacific salmon from spawning, she said.
“When an Atlantic salmon gets into a stream even as little as one day before a wild fish, the wild fish won’t stay in the stream because it senses an alien,” she said.
For years people thought Atlantic salmon were not hardy enough to survive in the Pacific, but the fish have been found in local waters, Mosness said.
Atlantic salmon may further harm native fish with the diseases they carry, she said.
“No organism is disease free and when they’re in crowded conditions the weak fish can catch (them more easily),” Mosness said. “There’s nothing about it that is good.
“There are voluminous amounts of feces, ever increasing amounts of antibiotics, pesticides that are rampant and killing the wild salmon that migrate past.”
Alaska has permanently banned all net-pen operations on its shorelines because of the potential danger they poses to fish and the environment. In 1995, British Columbia established a similar ban on new net-pen operations along their coastline, but decided to lift the moratorium early in 2002. The number of fish farms is expected to increase despite the excess of fish on the market.
“(Fish farming is) known to be detrimental — it’s just driven by profits,” Mosness said. “There’s no need for these fish.”
Mosness said she is also concerned about the antibiotics and pigments fed to fish, even though they are both approved by the FDA.
“We also allowed DDT for decades,” Mosness said. “If there are emerging risks, then we can’t wait until there is a catastrophe to rectify a grave error.”
The FDA identifies the dyes, astaxanthin and canthaxanthin, as safe for human consumption, but requires food products to be labeled to inform consumers of the additive.
County health departments oversee food labels in Washington, but do not regulate dyed salmon because the pigments are added to the feed and not the harvested fish, environmental health specialist Tom Kunesh said.
A farmed salmon fillet sitting next to a wild salmon fillet shows more than just a color difference. The lack of exercise and years of confinement produce a fattier fish with wider muscle grain.
“The flesh is flaccid, there is no firmness to it,” Mosness said. “It’s like putting your finger into margarine or lard.”
Mosness worries about research to incorporate more vegetable protein and less animal protein into fish feed. The fish will grow at the same rate but its fatty acid composition will change. Consumers looking for a high omega-3 and low omega-6 fatty acid meal will be getting just the opposite.
Moore can only watch his industry die off slowly. Fishing has become a hobby – something he does occasionally for fun.
“Its exciting watching the fish come aboard, picking them out one by one,” Moore said. “So you’re having this connection with this fish, one at a time, getting them out of the net. You get to see them, see what they really look like. They all have their own features.”
Moore said he doesn’t see the situation for fishermen getting any better.
“You can’t rely on it as a source of income,” Moore said.
He said he hopes one day net pens will be banned. He believes fish farming and wild fishing can coexist if farms are located inland. This would eliminate the risk of non-native fish escaping, protecting native fish, while the higher costs to run an inland operation would give commercial fishermen a fair price in the fish market. Unfortunately for Moore and fishermen worldwide, this solution may never come.
Junior Tam Huynh studies biology at Western. She has previously been published in The Current, Green River Community College’s student newspaper and the Planet Magazine.