The Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform
Farmed and Dangerous Blog
Aquabounty salmon vs. normal salmon
Q: What do you get when you mix the genes of an Atlantic salmon, a Chinook salmon and an ocean pout?
A: The latest in the world of salmon farming – the “Frankenfish”. It’s a genetically engineered construct with a voracious appetite and a growth rate twice that of any natural salmon. An American company, AquaBounty, is trying to bring the fish to market. (more…)
Eco-certified farmed salmon? Organic farmed salmon? Sustainable seafood is big business and a plethora of eco-labels and eco-certifications for seafood exist on the market today. Salmon aquaculture alone has five farmed salmon certifications on the market with more on the way. (more…)
Dead juvenile pink salmon with lice
A new paper published this week suggesting that sea lice do not harm wild Pacific salmon does not provide conclusive evidence and fails to convince when weighed against the full scope of previous science on the subject. (more…)
This summer organics hit a new low. With funding support from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) members of the aquaculture industry developed their own draft organic aquaculture standards. The allowances in the standards—including organic certification of fish treated with antibiotics and chemicals toxic to marine organisms—would make any organic label reader turn pale. (more…)
When faced with managing serious impacts of important oceans industries, the Canadian government sometimes pulls out their weaksaurus. Unlike a normal thesaurus, the weaksaurus doesn’t give you synonyms. Instead, it kind of gives you words that vaguely convey a weaker version of the original word. We’ll call them weakonyms. The recently released Draft Standards for Organic Aquaculture, put out by the government of Canada (the Canadian General Standards Board and DFO), have some great weakonyms, most of which serve to weaken the language in the standards for fish aquaculture. (more…)
Whenever you hear about salmon farm impacts, inevitably it is about sea lice infecting wild juvenile salmon, or maybe diseases. However, there is another issue that is very concerning…the potential that the waste from salmon farms are contaminating and killing off shellfish beds. (more…)
Neil Frazer, a science professor at the University of Hawaii who has been carefully following the BC salmon farming issue for many years, was recently part of a delegation to Norway to meet with top management at Cermaq, the parent company for Mainstream Canada. Mainstream is the second largest salmon farm company operating in BC. (more…)
