Exchange focuses on salmon farming

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They are thousands of miles apart, but the salmon farms that dot the Down East coastline may be moving closer in practice to the ocean pens off Ireland’s western shores.

Dr. David Jackson of Ireland’s Marine Institute said Saturday that the Maine and Canadian fish farmers he met last week are interested in his country’s experience with single-bay management – developing comprehensive aquaculture plans on a bay-by-bay basis.

Jackson, director of the institute’s salmon management division, visited Maine and New Brunswick as part of an information exchange between Ireland’s Department of the Marine and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

He was accompanied on his five-day tour by Mary Colligan, NMFS regional endangered species specialist, and Ed Baum, a fisheries consultant for NMFS who visited Irish salmon farms in May.

Colligan said Saturday she sees great potential for further collaboration between Ireland and the United States, particularly in the area of single-bay management.

The next step, Colligan said, is to discuss the concept with Maine’s salmon farmers, probably during a meeting next month with representatives of the industry, the Atlantic Salmon Federation and Trout Unlimited.

Jackson said single-bay management has been an aquaculture licensing requirement in Ireland since 1993.

Its purpose is to balance a sustainable aquaculture industry with concerns for wild salmon and sea trout and the tourism and leisure activities that are an important part of western Ireland’s economy.

Single-bay management is known as CLAMS – the acronym for coordinated local aquaculture management systems. CLAMS brings together aquaculture operators who work in the same bay or biological unit with state agencies to develop a plan specific to the bay, he said.

“The plan is tailor-made for the bay, but it has to conform to government guidelines such as separating generations of salmon, harvesting practices and vaccinating smolts before they go into the sea,” Jackson said.

The single-bay approach – which Ireland uses with blue mussels, oysters and scallops as well as finfish – is more effective than each farm responding on its own to problems such as sea lice, he said.

Irish salmon farmers are battling sea lice but, so far, Ireland has not experienced an outbreak of infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, Jackson said.

ISA, a fatal hemorrhaging disease, decimated New Brunswick salmon farms several years ago and recently was detected in at least three salmon farms in Cobscook Bay.

“ISA is in Scotland and there’s a major initiative to make sure that any equipment or production moving between the two countries doesn’t bring it in,” Jackson said.

Ireland doesn’t have Maine’s problem with aquaculture escapes, Jackson said.

Maine salmon farms operate in sheltered areas, usually in the lee of an island, Jackson said. Irish salmon pens, which stretch from Donegal to Kerry, are exposed to the entire Atlantic Ocean blasting in on them during the winter.

As a result, the Irish pens have to be very rugged, he said.

And aquaculture escapees don’t pose the same threat to wild runs in Ireland as they do to Maine’s wild salmon, Jackson said.

While wild salmon are on the decline throughout Europe, Ireland still has runs of thousands of wild fish, he said.

The Irish are worried about decreasing numbers of spring-run Atlantic salmon, but those runs are still up around 700, Jackson said.

By contrast, Maine’s wild runs – which are in the tens rather than thousands – are so low that escapees can threaten the genetic integrity of the remaining wild fish or infect them with disease, Baum said.

Jackson said Irish fish farmers are required to report escapes and the escapees make up less than 1 percent of Ireland’s salmon runs.

Colligan said the NMFS doesn’t have statistics on the number of farmed salmon that escape from Maine pens because the salmon industry works under a voluntary reporting system that began last fall when wild Atlantic salmon in eight Maine rivers were placed on the endangered species list.

The number of aquaculture escapees in Maine rivers varies from a small percentage to nearly 100 percent of the run in some rivers, she said.

Jackson said the west of Ireland is struggling with many of the same issues as Down East Maine.

The Irish aquaculture industry was started in the mid-1970s and grew slowly until the mid-1980s when, like the industry in Maine and Canada, it began to take off, he said.

Controversy arose and the Irish government responded by adopting very strict regulations on issuing licenses, Jackson said.

And like Mainers, the people of western Ireland always have regarded the sea as open to everybody. The idea of issuing permits for specific areas of the ocean was a big cultural change, he said.

“But this is a growing industry and there aren’t a lot of industries around,” Jackson said. “Traditional fisheries are in decline and aquaculture is seen by local communities as a new lease on life.”

Visual concerns about ocean pens and the threat farmed salmon may pose to wild salmon and sea trout remain big issues, as does access to the intertidal area when it comes to shellfish, he said.

“There is competition for the resource between tourism and leisure, pleasure angling and commercial fisheries,” Jackson said. “One of the big challenges over the next number of years is the European initiative for coastal zone management.”

Jackson said every country in the European Union will have to develop a plan to balance competing uses of the ocean.

“You can have aquaculture, traditional fisheries, tourism and leisure, but there has to be a plan,” he said.

Jackson returned to Ireland on Sunday, but Colligan said she and Baum expect to meet with him again next March when the aquaculture liaison committee of the North American Salmon Conservation Organization meets in Ireland.