B.C. places moratorium on salmon farming on North Coast

by The Philosophical Fish

It’s ironic, we are so fixated on the negatives of fish farming that we fail to see that there are also benefits…support to coastal communities devastated by depleted fish stocks. Benefits to the wild fish because aquaculture can, to some degree, reduce the pressure on wild stocks. In the Skeena watershed the threat is not so much from farmed to wild, but the other way around. This is because of the huge sockeye run that moves through the Skeena system. Sockeye harbour IHNV, a virus that, although not particularly problematic for other Pacific salmon, is exquisitely deadly to Atlantics which have not co-evolved with the virus, it’s rather like human meets ebola…..