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The Rise of Fish Farming

In the 1970s, as historic runs of salmon returning to rivers and streams in the Pacific Northwest declined to the point where the National Marine Fisheries Service listed them as endangered, fish farmers in Washington and British Columbia were establishing saltwater pens of captive salmon, raising them as a Midwestern farmer would herds of cattle.

Fish farms consist of net pens suspended from steel or nylon walkways floating in the open ocean. From floating docks, caretakers feed salmon with pellets made from fish oil, fish meal, grain, vitamins and carotenoid pigments, which add a pinkish color to the flesh that wild salmon acquire naturally from a diet that includes small shellfish.

Fish farms originated in Norway and Scandinavia, and fish farmers on the Pacific coast borrowed European technology and improved on it. In the 1990s, farms multiplied along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to Chile. According to a report by Alaska labor economist Neal Gilbertsen, farmed salmon accounted for one percent of the world's salmon production in 1980. By 2002, salmon farmers were producing more than 60 percent of the world's commercial supply of salmon.

In British Columbia more than 90 salmon farms exist in coves on the outer coast of Vancouver Island south to Washington state. The closeness of salmon farms to Alaska worries biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, because most farmed fish are a different species than wild fish, and their escape could cause a biological disaster.

Atlantic Salmon

Since the late 1980s, Atlantic salmon has become the world's most common farmed species. Since the dawn of aquaculture in northern Europe, fish farmers have selected Atlantic salmon because they thrive in captivity. Atlantic salmon once spawned in streams and rivers from Connecticut to Portugal. Although they still live wild in diminished numbers in northern parts of their historic range, they are extinct in southern Europe.

Farmed Atlantic salmon do well in Pacific waters, growing to marketable size in about 30 months. They can be ready for market year-round, which gives fish farmers an advantage over Alaska fishermen who catch fresh fish primarily in midsummer when salmon return to spawning rivers and streams.

Critics of the farms have pointed out that penned fish receive vaccinations and the oceans around farms can become polluted with fish feces and excess feed. The major fear of biologists is the escape of farmed Atlantic salmon into the wild.

Domesticated Atlantic salmon in Scandinavia have escaped from pens and spread disease and parasites to wild fish, according to biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, who wrote a paper on the Atlantic salmon and its threat to native fish in Alaska. Unlike wild species of Pacific salmon, Atlantic salmon may survive spawning runs, return to the sea, and then return to streams to spawn again. That ability, plus the Atlantic salmon's voracious appetite, may allow it to outcompete Alaska fish. State officials have already confirmed more than 600 Atlantic salmon found in Alaska waters; the fish are escapees from farms on the Pacific coast or, perhaps, the offspring of escapees.

Alaska Bans Salmon Farming

Fearing the biological threat from escaped Atlantic salmon and the negative effects of farming on the commercial fishing industry, Alaska legislators in 1990 banned "finfish farming," citing a section of the state constitution that calls for sustainability of fish and wildlife resources.

Since then, fish farms have achieved dominance in the world salmon market, using advantages such as the ability to offer fresh fish year-round, predict harvests and fill orders on the spot.

With such a large now source of salmon emerging from saltwater pens, prices for wild Alaska salmon crashed, with an average 85 percent decline in value for pinks, sockeyes, chinooks, chums and coho from 1988 to 2002.

"Imagine how you would feel if your salary was cut by 80 percent," state economist Gilbertsen said. "And the fishermen weren't getting rich before that."

In 1990, fishermen received $559 million for 302,600 metric tons of wild Alaska salmon. In 2002, they received $130 million for 238,000 metric tons.

"You're in effect catching more and more fish that are worth less and less," Gilbertsen said. "People are throwing up their hands and saying, 'Why am I doing this?'"

"As long as you manage to catch five times as many fish as you used to, you can keep going," said Bob Thorstenson, a salmon fisherman and president of the United Fishermen of Alaska. "If you fish salmon only, it's like the Great Depression."

Unlike other fishermen who have expanded to pollock and other species, Thorstenson still fishes only for salmon but he now works harder. Seven or eight years ago, he fished for three months each year: Thorstenson now fishes from early June until Thanksgiving, chasing salmon from Southeast Alaska to northern Puget Sound.

"Even though prices are terrible, there's been enough bankruptcies that you've got a lot less guys fishing and there's more spots to fish," he said.

Hungry Consumers

Once, while visiting my parents in New York, I held my tongue when my father returned from the grocery store waving a package of chum salmon filet.

"Alaska salmon!" he said.

I didn't tell him that chum is the species most eaten by Alaska village dogs, because we humans feel other species are superior, in the following order: chinook (king), sockeye (red), coho (silver) and pink. But I also didn't pass up any chum after he grilled it, and it was delicious. And as a consumer, I didn't object to eating the pen-raised chinook from British Columbia that I purchased from a Fred Meyer grocery in Fairbanks when assigned to do this article. Though I prefer the lovely, firm texture of fresh Copper River reds and have been close to ecstasy when eating smoked kings dripping with fat from the lower Yukon, the farm-raised fish was decent. Mostly, I felt lucky when eating that .-farmed chinook. While the vast majority of North Americans get to see only tinted fillets in the supermarket, I have the privilege of pulling beautiful, silvery wild bodies out of the water.

Thorstenson, the salmon fisherman who grew up in Petersburg and now splits his time between Juneau and Seattle, said he knows that farmed fish are not going away, and that the Alaska salmon market will recover when Alaskans do a better job of creating new products, get them to stores faster and do a better job of selling.

"We're going to go out and market our product and people will like it because it's the best," Thorstenson said.

Gilbertsen, the state economist, said he thinks most salmon consumers in the Lower 48 are like my dad and probably don't realize what they are buying when they pick up a fillet at the grocery story.

"For sophisticated consumers of fish who know a wild king salmon from a farmed Atlantic salmon, I think (the study) will register, but for most consumers around the ., I'd kind of doubt it," Gilbertsen said.

The Toxin Study

In early January, news wires were flooded -with the results of a new study: Researchers found higher levels of toxins in farmed salmon than in wild fish. It was enough to make Alaskans a bit smug and might have caused a few beers to be raised toward TVs in Alaska port-town bars. But what was the real story?

Six scientists combined their efforts to author "Global Assessments of Organic Contaminants in Farmed Salmon," which appeared in the January 9, 2004, edition of the journal Science.

"The overall message of the study is that farmed Atlantic salmon is, on average, more contaminated than wild Pacific salmon, that within farmed salmon there are regional differences in contamination and that the issue is not an unsolvable problem," said one of the study's authors, Barbara Knuth of Cornell University in Ithaca, .

The researchers examined samples of about 700 farmed and wild salmon from Scotland to Alaska, looking for pollutants including PCBs, dioxins and pesticides. They found the highest concentrations in farmed salmon from Scotland and the Faroe Islands. Wild salmon had less of the pollutants than any of the farmed fish they tested.

The study included a table showing "consumption advisories (in meals per month) based on . EPA cumulative risk assessment methods." The authors advised no more than one meal per month of farmed salmon, and-in an eye-catching result for Alaskans-no more than one meal per month of Southeast Alaska chinook and no more than two meals per month of Southeast sockeye.

Alaska Officials Say "Keep Eating"

"Our recommendation is unlimited consumption of wild Alaska salmon," said Lori Verbrugge, an environmental toxicologist for the Alaska Division of Public Health in Anchorage. "It's nice to get the data from that study-we're always looking for salmon data. But I'm not thrilled with the interpretation of the data."

Verbrugge, whose job it is to monitor the safety of the fish, game and other foods eaten by Alaskans, said the Environmental Protection Agency's cancer-risk assessment guidelines are "extremely conservative.

"I don't think cancer could be caused at levels (of salmon eating) like this," Verbrugge said. "Even those farmed salmon numbers aren't high. I wouldn't be telling my mother in the Lower 48 not to eat farmed salmon anymore."

What's the Real Risk?

The author of a recent article in Eating Well magazine cited Purdue University professor Charles Santerre's interpretation of the risk to salmon eaters based on the Science study. Santerre said that if you consumed eight ounces of farmed salmon each week for 70 years, you would increase your cancer risk by 1 in 100,000. A person is three times more likely to die by lighting strike than by cancer caused by eating salmon, Santerre said.

"He's on the right track," Verbrugge said.

Knuth, the Science study co-author, said the lightning analogy was probably correct but was not necessarily a relevant comparison. The risk in eating farmed or wild salmon is slight, she said, but it exists.

"You don't have control about whether you're struck by lighting, but you have control over your choice of food," she said.

Verbrugge said Alaska fish and game are some of the least-polluted sources of animal protein on the planet.

"I did my graduate work on the Great Lakes at Michigan State, and levels of contaminants in fish there were up to 100 times higher than here," she said. "When I got here I said, 'Wow, these fish are clean. We sure are lucky to be able to eat this.'"

Nutrition scientists have written about the health benefits of salmon, including omega-3 fatty acids that help prevent heart disease. Researchers have also recently suggested a possible connection between depression and changes from fish-rich diets to foods with less omega-3s.

"There's so many good things about fish we don't feel there's any evidence to steer people away from them," Verbrugge said.

NED ROZEI,L writes our "Wilderness Adventurer" column and is the author of WALKING MY DOG, JANE: FROM VALDEZ TO PRUDHOE BAY ON THE TRANS-ALASKA PIPELINE, published by Duquesne University Press and now available in paperback.