It looks like you may have let me get under your skin a bit. Sorry for that Banx. But Really, I do not see the need for you to make up stories in an attempt to prove your point of view. However, all the power to you if it makes you feel better.
you are correct, you have gotten under my skin. You demand evidence of people opposing farms yet you deflect every question addressing your own credibility. No one I have met personally supports open pen farming as it stands. The only logical reason someone would be a supporter is if they have a financial association with it. I don't think your a stupid human being, so that only leaves money.
You have failed to support any of your claims regarding being a 'sports fisher' and you have also failed to substantiate your claims of being a supporter of morton. All of which leads me to conclude that moving to closed containment is in fact a conflict of interest for you. Again I don't think i'm making up stories..... but your welcome to prove me wrong.
regardless of what has transpired all over the world and the fact that man has had his actions backfire each time he has played god you are still pro open pen.
we have seen diseases/viruses develop in other species we farm and have paid the consequences. Yet, in your eyes, allowing these pens to float around in some of the most pristine environments in the world mingling with a myraid of natural occurring species is all fine and dandy...... just blows my mind. seriously, like boom.
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/52/22599.full.pdfBecause farm-source sea lice accounted for 98% of the variability
in wild salmon sea lice prevalence from 2002 to 2009 and
sea lice were sometimes
common on farmed Atlantic salmon
during the 1990s, farm-source sea lice probably infested juvenile
pink salmon many years before they were first examined for sea
lice in 2001 (1). As evidence, we show that sea lice were abundant
on farm fish in 2000 (Fig. 1). Before 2000, farm fish sea lice were
usually not quantified, but infestations were common enough that
sea lice treatment options were investigated in the early 1990s
http://www.ecoserve.ie/projects/sealice/caligus3.pdfAlthough noticeable effects of environmental factors such
as season and salinity affect farm lice levels,
any natural patterns of lice variation were masked by considerable
variations in levels within and between farms caused by local conditions and farm management practices. Recycling of infection within farms is common but there is evidence that fallowing of farm sites between generations of stocks can greatly reduce lice levels.
The pattern of changes in salmonid populations was considered to be too complex to easily summarise but generally, it was considered that an overall problem in salmonid populations occurred mainly due to an increase in the post-smolt mortality.
There is no doubt that heavy lice infections are highly pathogenic both in farmed and wild fish. Heavy infections with juvenile stages of lice can stress fish but most of the gross pathology and mortality is caused by preadult and adult lice, particularly immediately following development of the lice to the pre-adult stage.
http://www.seaweb.org/resources/documents/reports_farmingsalmon.pdfSimilarly, sea lice, which previously had been rarely observed on wild salmon, now are
regularly found on wild salmon in Ireland, Scotland, and Norway. Heavy infestations of
sea lice appear to cause higher mortality of smolts at sea.
http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/Library/338123.pdfSea lice have been reported to cause serious disease in many seawater netpen facilities
http://www.seaweb.org/resources/documents/reports_farmingsalmon.pdfBy 1995, Atlantic salmon that had escaped from salmon cages were reported in 18 rivers in British Columbia. Commercial fishermen in this part of the Pacific Ocean reported a tenfold increase in their catch of Atlantic salmon. In producing 32,000 tonnes of farmed salmon in 1995, B.C. salmon farmers used fish meal produced from 118,000 tonnes of fish from the Pacific Ocean off South America,
generating as much sewage as a city of 500,000 people.In a typical salmon farm, roughly one-third of moist feed falls through the netpen to the
water column and sea bottom. Another 20 percent of the food becomes feces. Altogether,
as much as 1,080 tonnes of waste ore generated in producing 1,000 tonnes of fish.
Four years after the first salmon farms appeared in New Brunswick in 1979, farmed
salmon escapees accounted for 5.5 percent of the salmon in the Magaguadavic River. By
1995, farmed salmon made up 90 percent of the salmon in this river. (not BC but sweet jesus thats impressive)
In the summer of 1997, 300,000 Atlantic salmon escaped from several net pens in Puget
Sound, when the nets were torn during a move to avoid an algal bloom.
http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/Library/278452.pdfWhile scientific certainty is not absolute, European research does indicate that sea lice
abundance can be associated with salmon farming. Given this evidence, combined with
the presence of sea lice on Broughton Archipelago pink salmon smolts, and the fact the
decline in numbers was limited to Broughton Archipelago fish, the Council believes that
sea lice were associated with the decline observed in the Broughton Archipelago. Where
there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm the precautionary approach calls for action
based on the best evidence available. In this Broughton Archipelago case, the absence of
any evidence of some other cause, than sea lice, justifies action.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1602048/#bib30Lice frequently infest farm salmon, and many studies have linked planktonic lice and lice parasitizing wild salmonids with the presence of farms (Tully & Whelan 1993; Costelloe et al. 1996, 1998a,b; Todd et al. 1997; Mackenzie et al. 1998; Tully et al. 1999; Bjørn et al. 2001; Bjørn & Finstad 2002; Marshall 2003; Morton & Williams 2004; Morton et al. 2004; McKibben & Hay 2004; Penston et al. 2004; Carr & Whoriskey 2004). Sympatric wild salmonid populations may then be affected: farms have been implicated in the infestation and collapse of pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) cohorts in Pacific Canada (PFRCC 2002; Morton & Williams 2004; Morton et al. 2004), wild sea trout (Salmo trutta) and Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) populations in Europe (McVicar 1997, 2004).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3012511/Several studies have attempted to explain the impact of sea lice and salmon farming on pink salmon population decline, but these studies have been limited by lack of access to fish farm data (14–17). In one series of studies, juvenile pink salmon of unknown history were captured from the wild (2004–2007), separated by lice infestation status into field-based enclosures, and held for several weeks to assess differences in mortality (14, 18, 19). Results from these studies were used to support the conclusion that “recurrent louse infestations of wild juvenile pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), all associated with salmon farms, have depressed wild pink salmon populations and placed them on a trajectory toward rapid local extinction” (3). However, the
field mortality studies were not able to differentiate whether sea lice were the cause of mortality or whether sea lice had preferentially attached to fish that were destined to die from some other cause. To overcome this deficiency, other research exposed juvenile pink salmon of known history to Pacific forms of L. salmonis under controlled laboratory conditions (20); results were used to estimate that sea lice killed no more than 4.5% of juvenile pink salmon in any given year from 2005 to 2008 (21).
Conclusions from these studies remain controversial, in part because they depend on experimental results from confined wild fish. Pink salmon sometimes adapt poorly to confinement (22) and change their behavior when exposed to sea lice (23); therefore, experimental results might overestimate or underestimate mortality among lice-infested fish in the wild. To overcome limitations inherent in using experimental studies to estimate population outcomes, we use a combination of approaches common in medical science and mathematical modeling to analyze actual farm data in relation to wild salmon information.
http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/courses/bio416/gross_cjfas_1998.pdf http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mlewis/Publications%202008/Krkosek_FishSci.pdfhttp://www.sfu.ca/cstudies/science/resources/1320966463.pdfthough not directed at you robert. (honestly) I'm sure just about everyone who has contributed or read this thread has felt this same way.
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