Proposal made to raise steelhead at area fish farms
The company whose collapsed fish farm off Cypress Island in August 2017 allowed hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon to be released into the region’s waters may use its remaining net pens to raise steelhead trout. That company, Cooke Aquaculture, has applied for permits to begin raising steelhead at its floating facilities in Puget Sound, where the state Legislature no longer allows the raising of Atlantic salmon. On Tuesday, the state Department of Fish & Wildlife announced plans to approve those permits. Fish & Wildlife also determined the proposal doesn’t warrant an environmental impact statement, or EIS, under the state Environmental Policy Act. “This proposal will likely not have a significant adverse impact on the environment,” Fish & Wildlife documents state. Kimberly Cauvel reports. (Skagit Valley Herald)
Filed under: Aquaculture, Puget Sound | Tagged: Net Pens Aquaculture, Puget Sound |
To call these fish native steelhead is a stretch. These fish are “domesticated,” which in this case means they are genetically unfit, grossly overweight with small heads, slow swimmers, poor at mating, etc. Almost all are sterile, but if the 600,000 planned for Port Angeles were to escape, close to 5,000 would not be sterile. They could pass on terrible genes to native fish or just mate with native fish and produce no offspring, wasting the efforts of the native mate.
The net pens still have all the problems of net pens of Atlantic salmon: They are concentrated feeding areas that concentrate wastes, toxins, pesticides and promote the spread of disease and parasites to wild fish.
Roughly half the feed these fish receive is other fish, reducing food for wild fish. The other half is grain meal that uses up a lot of land to and habitat to produce and spoils that habitat with pesticides and fertilizers. Net pen fish are a poor way to produce food efficiently and responsibly in an era of severe over-population and a climate crisis that threatens us all.
Fish & Wildlife and the state DNR have proven to be poor at monitoring and enforcing even gross violations. Clallam Co.’s Dept. of Community Development has an even worse record of protecting the environment. It will rubber stamp this proposal, just as it did the last time.