Wild Salmon Strategy: One of reLAKSation’s regular readers has shared a post from a Facebook group called the Salmon Fishing Club. This is administered by an angler named Ken Reid, whom I have previously been made aware of. This is because he has strong views that salmon farming is largely responsible for the current wild salmon crisis.
In his post, Mr Reid has called for a Parliamentary inquiry into Scotland’s wild Atlantic salmon. He says that the question is not whether Atlantic salmon are in crisis but whether ‘we’ are doing enough to understand and address all of the pressures driving the decline. In my opinion, we don’t need an inquiry to answer this question because anyone who has watched the crisis unfold, will know that very little, if anything at all, has been done to either understand what is happening to wild salmon, or more importantly, done something about it.
The reasons why are simple. Firstly, there is a widespread belief within the angling fraternity that salmon farming has been a major driver of the decline. They are perfectly entitled to this view, but the problem is that they are totally unwilling to discuss the issues. Their response is either to quote tobacco industry type misinformation or to block anyone trying to engage in a discussion. I understand that the Salmon Fishing Club recently did this to two people from the salmon farming sector. The second reason is that they believe that they should be allowed to fish at all costs. They claim that they have little impact on stocks as the catch and release rate is so high. Unfortunately, a high catch and release rate in recent years masks the fact that the damage was done many years ago. In fact, as I have pointed out previously, wild salmon stocks have been in decline since the 1970s. Unfortunately, although the data showing the decline was available, no-one bothered to look because anglers were not having difficulty catching salmon, meaning they didn’t see there was a problem, but a growing problem there was.
Mr Reid has said that the time has come for an inquiry that would be wide ranging including examination of marine survival, predation, aquaculture interactions, escapes and genetic introgression, sea lice, barriers to migration, abstraction, pollution, habitat degradation, increasing river temperatures, juvenile recruitment, exploitation, hatcheries and conservation stocking and the resources available for restoration. He adds that any assessment of aquaculture impacts should include consideration of the FMS aquaculture scheme because it is fundamentally flawed in that it focuses on future farmed salmon escapes, whilst ignoring historic environmental damage along with genetic introgression that is creating juvenile offspring that have high mortality rates that accelerate population declines.
As I said, Mr Reid and the Salmon Fishing Club like the focus to be on salmon farming regardless of any evidence that wild salmon are in crisis because of high mortality rates experienced by juvenile salmon. Yet, Mr Reid says that the aim of the inquiry would not be to apportion blame to one sector. However, I suspect that he would be pleased if it did as long as it is not directed at the angling sector, whom we know are blameless, despite having caught and killed around 6 million ready to breed wild salmon and sea trout since records began in 1952.
Mr Reid’s post continues that Scotland has a Wild Salmon Strategy and an implementation plan. Considerable work is being undertaken by fisheries boards, trusts, conservation organisations, scientists, anglers, proprietors and government agencies. However, despite Mr Reid’s assurances that considerable work is being undertaken, salmon numbers continue to fall. The reality is that the scientists to whom Mr Reid refers, have been monitoring catches since 1952 and have effectively done nothing to either try to slow down or halt the decline. This is not surprising since angling has always been given precedence over everything else.
However, Mr Reid’s assertion that considerable work is being undertaken as part of the Wild Salmon Strategy is very much open to question. It is only necessary to look at the published minutes of the meeting of the Wild Salmon Strategy Delivery Group to see that there is little effort being directed at saving wild salmon in Scotland.
There are minutes from meetings stretching back to 2023 on the Government website including two from 2026. The first is the meeting from 28th of January which was published on 19th of March and the second from the meeting of 4th of March which were published on the 27th of August, nearly six months after the meeting took place. The next meeting was due to take place on 13th of May of which no minutes have yet been published.
The most notable aspect of the March meeting was that the Chair welcomed Mr Ken Reid as a stand in representative for Angling Scotland. The make-up of the group reflects the dominance of the angling sector in developing the Wild Salmon Strategy. At the March meeting there were five representatives from the Marine Directorate including one from the scientific sector. In addition, there was one representative from Nature Scotland and one from SEPA. A representative from the Scottish Wildlife Trust sent their apologies as did someone from Scottish Forestry and one from the Environment and Forestry Directorate. The remaining eight members of the group represent fisheries interests including the Crown Estate. The Wild Salmon Strategy would be better described as Wild Salmon Fisheries Strategy because it is very much about keeping the salmon fisheries open rather than protecting wild salmon.
When the minutes of the recent meeting are examined, it is difficult to identify any recommendations for specific action to help protect wild salmon. Instead, the delivery group discussed such things as the design of a logo for a new communications strategy. The group considered three options and decided on one with the caveat that the word ‘Scottish’ should be added. I don’t know what the communications group is supposed to do but if they take as long as the delivery group to deliver meeting minutes then wild salmon could be history before any news emerges.
The delivery group also considered the option of a virtual dashboard which some of the group will discuss in terms of whether the idea should be progressed. They also discussed whether ‘industry’ representatives should be invited to future meetings, but the minutes didn’t mention what industries would be included. However, it is already clear that a wider membership might benefit wild salmon rather than relying on such a narrow interest group.
Matters better relating to fish included discussion of salmon and offshore wind applications, beavers and how SEPA might have the resources to estimate the additional salmon smolts from areas of newly opened-up habitats.
Mr Reid and Angling Scotland expressed concerns about non-compliant introductions of non-native fish.
What any of this has to do with stopping the decline of wild salmon numbers is a total mystery but then the wild salmon sector has previously shown very little interest in acting to halt the decline of wild salmon during the last fifty-five years so why would they change now. As long as they can continue fishing seems to be all that matters, which is why it is always good to have someone else to blame for the decline.
I have previously written about the Wild Salmon Strategy science and evidence board who supply scientific advice to the delivery group. The last minutes of their meetings were published on 1st December from a meeting that took place on the 12th of August of the same year.
On the 16th of December the group published two documents, one about bird predation and the other about recovery stocking of salmon into weak populations. The latter is based on a Scottish Government report – Science of Salmon Stocking: Scientific Considerations in Stocking Policy Development for River Managers. This is by Gilbey, Cauweiler, MacDonald, Curtis and Armstrong. Scottish Marine & Freshwater Science Vol 14 No 3. This was published in 2023 and including covers runs to 66 pages. Like most Marine Directorate publications about stocking, the scientists sit firmly on the fence avoiding having to give a direct recommendation to stock or not. However, their underlying message, as it has always been, is to avoid stocking due to the risks of damaging wild salmon stocks.
However, wild salmon stocks have been continually ‘damaged’ over many years with over-exploitation weakening the gene pool by harvesting over 3.6 million wild salmon since 1952, stocking with fish from different rivers and even deliberately stocking with farmed salmon. For years, it has been argued that salmon from different rivers are from different stocks but the £1 million 2012 FASMOP project failed to show this was true. The project has now largely been erased from public memory. Finally, none of the reports mention Darwin and the fact that even if stocking was considered damaging, Darwinian evolution would prevail and those fish that were unable to compete would simply not survive.
The problem is that whilst the Victorians were happy to stock, the wild fish sector now associated hatcheries with farming and as farming is their pet hate, hatcheries also fall into the same territory.
Given the recent discussions about AI mediated research, I was searching for one of the references cited by the Scottish Government and the answer I received was – the citation you provided refers to a highly influential, open access, scientific review paper published in the journal of Evolutionary Applications. The problem besides having to decide whether the paper is highly influential is that it is not open access and cost $62 to download a copy. So much for AI!
Meanwhile on Mr Reid’s salmon fishing club Facebook page, there was recently a long criticism of the River Carron restoration project, about which I have written previously. Simply put, they say that the new findings do not provide a scientific basis for a general return to salmon hatcheries. They say that the current conservation status of the river Carron is poor which should caution against presenting 30 years of stocks as evidence of a successful recovery as stocking may not have failed to resolve the decline but may itself be one of the pressures affecting wild salmon populations. This is a perfectly valid view, but it may be helpful to understand that the conservation status has declined because the project was forced to reduce the number of fish previously stocked. However, whatever case the River Carron Restoration Project has made, is dismissed because the overall conclusion drawn in this Facebook commentary is that in the long term, use of hatcheries can be harmful and ultimately counterproductive.
Yet in the same week, The Speyonline Blog reports that the Jökla river in Iceland is a river that is nothing short of remarkable. In 2006, a dam was built on the river as it had previously been unfishable due to the torrent of water After that dam was built the water flow slowed making the river more suited to fishing. First, fish had to be reintroduced into the river using a hatchery stocking programme but within ten years, the river was showing signs of a self-sustaining population and by the early 2020, the population had firmly taken root. Today nine to ten thousand fish return annually and apparently none of the fish have come from ranched smolts. The Blog says that the river is living proof of what can be achieved when everyone involved shares the same vision and works towards the same goal.
The most interesting story about restocking is reported by Sea West News in BC where the fisheries minister recently announced more than $53 million allocated to build three new First Nation linked salmon hatcheries with an expected production of close to one million juvenile Chinook and sockeye salmon each year. These will add to the more than 300 million juveniles that are released into BC’s rivers and coastal waters every year.
As Sea West News rightly points out, these fish begin life in a controlled production system just like farmed salmon. They are fed specifically formulated feed and raised under fish health programmes that can include vaccination and when required, treatment for diseases. The fish are then deliberately released into the wild where they face pathogens, predators and competition for food and habitat before returning years later to commercial recreational and Indigenous fisheries.
Sea West News say that many salmon runs are heavily dependent on hatchery production with hatchery production making up around 85% of Chinook production in at least one region. Yet the DFO’s wild salmon policy is clear as to what constitutes a wild salmon which is that they must have spent their entire life cycle in the wild and originated from parents that were produced by natural spawning and continuously lived in the wild.
The Canadian Government say that the new hatcheries will rebuild salmon populations, support Indigenous communities and strengthen food security, which is very similar to the case being made by coastal First Nations for maintaining salmon farming.
Yet Sea West News highlighted that the political treatment of the two systems could not be more different with hatcheries being described as enhancement and salmon farming being described as a threat to wild salmon. Hatcheries receive public investment and salmon farms are threatened with closure.
As elsewhere, the case is made that hatchery fish have the potential to damage wild salmon stocks, yet no-one is demanding their closure. Sea West News says that activists have for years being telling the public a neat story about wild and farmed salmon They conveniently forget to mention hatchery raised fish.
So where does this all leave wild salmon in Scotland? The answer is up the creek well and truly without a paddle.
The general consensus is that that hatcheries are bad although I suspect that the real problem is that anglers don’t feel like real people unless they are hunting and catching truly wild salmon with hatchery raised fish being second tier. At the same time, the idea of closing rivers to fishing is not even a consideration. There are some who believe that predation is a problem and that shooting seals and birds would solve much of the problem, but they also realise that this would not be palatable to the wider public.
Opening up habitat and barrier removal would be thought to be a way of increasing juvenile production but common sense suggests that juvenile numbers are already too low that new habitat is not going to make any difference.
The fundamental problem is that wild salmon have been in decline for over fifty years, and we still don’t know why. This is because the wild fish sector and their associated scientists have never bothered to find out and this is simply down to the fact that until about ten to fifteen years ago, salmon catches were considered healthy and therefore there wasn’t a problem.
Meanwhile, the wild fish sector and their scientists have been too focussed on blaming salmon farming without a shred of hard evidence to support their claims. More importantly, they dismiss any views that suggest otherwise as big industry PR and tobacco like misinformation. However, if they think that removing salmon farms will solve their problems, they will be extremely disappointed because salmon farming is not the cause of their problems.
Polished fish: Another regular correspondent has mentioned that he had heard that rivers in West Sutherland might have been stocked with sea trout of Polish origin during the 1950s but can no longer remember the exact detail. Having used the dreaded AI to search, the information is rather contradictory. One view is that Polish emigrees living in Scotland after WW2 had supplemented eggs in local rivers with sea trout obtained from people they knew in Poland. Yet at the same time, sea trout at the time were considered healthy and there would be no reason to restock. In addition, Poland was behind the Iron Curtain so it is difficult to see how such eggs could be sourced.
However, AI does report that around 35 to 40 years ago, the Loch Lomond Angling Improvement Association stocked Loch Lomond with eyed ova from sea trout of Baltic origin.
Anglers catching these fish in later years note that these introduced ‘Polish’ sea trout were instantly recognisable compared to the local fish as they were much stockier and had a compact shaped head and fewer spots on their flanks.
I would be interested to hear from anyone who has any knowledge of such or other unusual introductions. The problem is that such knowledge from long ago gets either forgotten or confused.