Net loss: Salmon farming is the go-to scapegoat for all that is wrong on Scotland’s west coast. The wild fish sector almost exclusively blame salmon farming for the massive decline of wild fish numbers, although some now grudgingly accept that there may be other reasons why salmon stocks have collapsed (not that they are making any effort to find out why – they are mostly busy working out how to catch more fish).
As part of the SEPA consultation, which is now coming to an end, I have been looking at some of the other factors that might have affected the size of the west coast stock and I discovered something really surprising. Commercial netting did not come to an end on the west coast until 2015. I had wrongly thought that netting had ceased long before that. Around the time netting did come to an end, I met with a retired worker from the Loch Ewe Estate who had worked on the nets there and told me that they had closed down in the mid-1980s simply because they weren’t catching enough fish to make the venture viable. I assumed that this applied to all west coast netting, but I was clearly wrong.
I have now analysed the full dataset and have been astonished by the results. Since 1952, when records began, a total of 1,085,346 salmon and grilse have been caught and killed by nets on the west coast. Since 1982 (which is when I label the beginnings of a commercial salmon farming industry) a total of 245,800 adult salmon and grilse have been killed by the nets. I can only wonder why the wild fish sector still blame salmon farming for the declines!
Interestingly, in 2011, the then SSPO issued a chart showing that the decline in salmon stocks on the west coast mirrored that of the east coast, when all exploitation was included. However, the wild fish sector criticised this comparison saying the exploitation by nets was different to exploitation by rods, although a fish is dead whether killed by netsmen or anglers. Their reasoning was that anglers continue to fish even when they catch nothing.
By ignoring netting, except to complain that netting should be banned because the nets were killing the same fish that anglers wanted to catch and kill, the wild fish sector has simply chosen to ignore the huge loss of fish to what are often small spate rivers with a limited size of breeding stock.
What is surprising is some of the fishery districts that saw the last closures of netting stations. Three districts saw the end of netting in 2015. These were the Lochy near Fort William, the Nell, south of Oban and Sligachan, down the east coast of Skye. Even more surprising is that netting of the Sunart fishery district ended as late as 2014. One particularly vocal critic of the salmon farming industry often mentions the river Strontian saying that its fish stocks have been wiped out by the presence of salmon farming. Given that there are no major salmon rivers in the Sunart fishery district, the loss of over 6,000 salmon and grilse must be highly significant.
Another area of netting that is of interest is the Torridon fishery district which closed in 2003. The Torridon system is where the Scottish Government established a field station in the 1990s to investigate the decline of sea trout, although it is clear that the research programme was aimed at looking at the impact of sea lice. The fact that the nets had taken over two and half thousand sea trout and were still in operation when the field station was established seems to have passed the researchers by. Over the same time period, over 30,000 salmon and grilse had been taken. This is huge when compared to the rod catch, which has been numbered in the tens and for many of the years, there has been no catch at all.
Netting is now history except for a small amount of net and coble fishing on the east coast. There is nothing that can be done to change what happened in the past, but if the wild fish sector want to look to the future, they cannot continue to blame those who are still there, for what others did in the times before them.
Closed of mind: A couple of weeks ago, a long-standing critic of the salmon farming industry, Dr James Merryweather continued his campaign with yet another letter in the West Highland Free Press. He wrote that Scotland should follow the other enlightened countries in banning salmon farming in order to stop the decline of wild salmon. He writes that land based closed containment salmon farms were well into production around the world with one near Miami projected to produce in excess of 200,000 tonnes annually by 2031 and that is without marine pollution and one in four of their fishes dying in the process.
When are such critics going to start to recognise that closed containment is not the answer. It has never been the answer. It was promoted by the wild fish sector in the hope that it would safeguard sufficient stocks of wild fish so they could catch and kill them.
The farm that Dr Merryweather says will produce 200,000 tones a year, actually produced just 400 tonnes in the second quarter of this year. At the end of July, they held a biomass of 2,700 tonnes. Two years ago, the company’s shares were at $17, now they are worth 20 cents. Analysts are now predicting the end is near for the company as they are unable to raise any more funding. One major investor has dumped all its shareholding resulting in a loss of $4.5 million.
I don’t wish to see any business collapse, but regular readers may remember that over the years, I have always questioned the sense in producing table fish this way. The drive for land-based farming has come from outside the industry for their own misguided reasons, none of which makes any commercial sense.
The wild fish sector in Scotland did try to set up their own closed containment unit to demonstrate how effective closed containment farming was. Unfortunately, they could never raise the funding, so the project never got off the ground. This has not deterred the critics such as Dr James Merryweather from thinking that land-based farming is the solution to helping anglers catch more fish.
Perspective: In the past, the salmon farming industry has been criticised for having to kill a seal as a last resort, usually, because the animal has managed to get stuck in a pen and all other attempts to release it have failed. Of course, the criticism has been aimed at salmon farming and not the seal because critics don’t seem interested if a seal should die at the hands of others. This was apparent long ago when it was legal to kill seals under licence. The wild fish sector killed many more seals than any salmon farmer, but it was only the salmon farming industry that was criticised. The same applies to anti-deterrent devices which are used by others but are highly criticised if used by salmon farmers.
The Times newspaper published an interesting story about the number of permits issued in Scotland to allow a wide variety of animals to be culled. Over the past four years, 47,000 different creatures were the subject of culling licences including geese, hares, buzzards, gulls, gannets, ravens, goosanders, robins, herons, magpies, oystercatchers, lapwings, starlings, curlews and rooks. The list of species is really surprising.
The greatest numbers of birds culled are geese totalling 16,369 birds including 4,809 barnacle geese, 1,862 pink footed geese, and 220 Canada geese.
More than 11,000 brown hares and mountain hares have been killed because of damage to crops and because they spread disease to game birds.
The numbers do not include the thousands of deer that are legally killed every year for sporting or environmental reasons.
It is interesting that there are many critics of salmon farming who never argue that culling on this scale is unacceptable. This is because those culling these animals are not salmon farmers.
Online auction: Some time ago, I discussed a podcast in which the head of the charity Wild Fish (Conservation) had related how the name of the organisation had been changed from Salmon & Trout Conservation in order to try to move away from its current members of 70 plus-year-old anglers towards a much younger (and larger) audience with a wider range of interests. The hope was that a wider audience would bring in much greater funding.
How successful this move to a greater appeal has been is unclear. However, the lots offered at the latest annual Wild Fish online auction would suggest that the interests of the membership have not changed. Out of 178 lots, about twenty are not directly related to salmon and trout angling. Most of the lots offer the chance to go fishing on various salmon and trout rivers.
Given their opposition to salmon farming and the claims that the industry has wiped out fishing on the west coast, it is surprising that one of the lots is to fish a grade 3 river in the heart of the aquaculture zone. The guide price of £450 includes fishing for two with three nights’ accommodation.
How does angling for salmon and trout help conserve stocks of these fish. It’s a mystery to me but sadly Wild Fish aren’t prepared to explain. Instead, they continue their campaign against salmon farming without any evidence that salmon farming is harmful to wild fish, whereas the damage that could be caused by catching and dragging them around by a hook is more than self-evident.