Farmed Salmon Can Be Deadly To Wild Fish
The farmed salmon on your plate might seem harmless, but the industry that produces it can unleash a deadly cocktail of disease and parasites on wild populations.
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- The farmed salmon on your plate might seem harmless, but the industry that produces it can unleash a deadly cocktail of disease and parasites on wild populations.
- It isn't just the lice doing the damage.
- Without those chemical dyes, your salmon dinner would look more like a piece of wet cardboard.
Most of the salmon you eat has never actually seen the ocean floor, but it might be responsible for a microscopic massacre happening miles away. Those neat, orange fillets at the grocery store started as residents of massive underwater cages where "natural" is a relative term.
These floating pens turn into biological pressure cookers. Because hundreds of thousands of fish are packed into tight quarters, a tiny parasite called a sea louse finds a feast it could never encounter in the wild. On a lone wild salmon, a few lice are an itch; in a farm, they multiply into a cloud of billions.
This is where the math gets lethal. When wild baby salmon swim past these farms on their way to the ocean, they have to navigate through a literal soup of parasites. A juvenile salmon is often smaller than a credit card, and it only takes two or three lice to eat through its skin and kill it.
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