(UPDATE: It still has not been definitively proven that the eclipse caused this failure. It was a story put forward by the company. It may not be accurate.)
“Whatever could go wrong?” they said and keep saying…. And the same company is wanting to put a huge net pen directly in the path of migrating wild salmon just west of Port Angeles. Public testimony will come in September. Hope you can attend! Note in the story that this company has treated these escaped fish for disease once already, and whatever they treated them with was also released into the Sound. Now these fish are out in the wild, competing with our wild salmon, including likely eating wild smolt.
I keep reminding people that we have spent and continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to restore wild stock. Elwha dam removal, re-engineering river beds, and much more, just to save our wild stocks. We keep allowing one small industry to put non-native fish that create disease vectors, attract wild salmon to the pens for food, put antibiotics into the waters around the pens, and destroy bottom habitat, usually for good (check out the waters under the old pens in Port Townsend for example). It’s time to call a halt to this nonsense based on an erroneous belief that this is a good way to grow protein.
Thousands of 10-pound Atlantic salmon were accidentally released into the waters between Anacortes and the San Juan Islands, and officials are asking people to catch as many as possible. Tribal fishers, concerned about native salmon populations, call the accident “a devastation.”