A few years after Alexandra Morton was successful in getting the BC government to end fish farms, which she proved were causing great harm to native runs, there is a massive return of native fish.
A reminder to any new readers, that over the last 15 years, I personally was present as employees of Taylor Shellfish did everything they could to discredit anyone challenging the fish farms. They disrupted a presentation by a leading scientific researcher in Port Angeles, Dr. Larry Dill and they routinely called Alexandra Morton a non scientific fraud in public meetings of the Jefferson County Marine Resources Committee. I was chair of the committee during these moments and was routinely needing to stop the outbreaks by a representative of the company who presented falsehoods about her credentials. I never knew whether they represented the management of the company, but since one of them was a manager of a local location of Taylor, it seemed reasonable to assume they did. Perhaps the time has come to have management at Taylor apologize for the behavior of their employees.
I am grateful to see the success of wild salmon returning to areas that just a few years ago were littered with the bodies of fish that died of parvovirus before being able to spawn.
“…Miller detected piscine orthoreovirus, or PRV, a new virus discovered only a few months earlier, as the cause of heart and skeletal muscle inflammation—HSMI—a disease spreading unchecked through the salmon farming industry in Norway. “ From The Georgia Strait newsletter.
From The Tyee, a B.C. newsletter this week.
“But in late July of this year, he said, the number of returning sockeye suddenly spiked.”
“That was incredible,” he said. “That was the most fish that’s ever been caught on that date, since test fishing began.”
While the nation was still waiting to hear on a commercial fishery, Svanvik said that each household was able to get 15 fish to fill their freezers — still a far cry from more than 100 in previous decades.
Svanvik also credits the spike in salmon to the removal of more than 40 fish farms from the salmon’s migration route.
While Taylor cautioned that “correlation is not causation,” he did say that this year’s positive returns shift responsibility onto government to prove that the aquaculture industry hasn’t been harming wild salmon.
“You don’t want to go back to those poor returns,” he said. “I think the onus shifts with this, and I think that’s the most important part of it.”
https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/08/14/Fraser-Sockeye-Returns-Prompt-Fishery-Openings/
Filed under: Around the Salish Sea, fishing, Olympic Peninsula | Tagged: Canada, Net Pens Aquaculture, Salmon |
While BC closes fish farms, we shouldn’t start up new ones in Port Angeles & elsewhere in WA.
As activists, we have much to learn from people like Alexandra Morton and Al Bergstein who fight to eliminate salmon farming. To understand what it takes, we would do well to read and re-read Morton’s book “Not on My Watch: How a renegade whale biologist took on governments and industry to save wild salmon”.