Sardines With Your Bagel? [What's Happening to the World's Fish]

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Taras Grescoe is the author of “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.”

Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/opinion/09grescoe.html?pagewanted=all

Heard this guy on KUOW a couple of weeks ago. Informative on the subject of failing fisheries.

What happened to the mighty chinook of the Pacific Northwest? Regional fisheries officials have blamed ocean conditions for a temporary decline in the plankton and small fish that juvenile salmon feed on. But most of the problem is man-made.

Spawning salmon need gravel streambeds and cold, fast-running water to lay their eggs. Giant pumps have been piping water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to towns and farms in California’s Central Valley, degrading river habitat and even sucking up young fish before they reach the sea. Farther north, dams on the Snake River have prevented egg-bearing fish from reaching streambeds inland.

Overfishing is also a factor; too many nets have been scooping up too many fish for too long. What’s more, higher water temperatures brought on by global warming prevent the eggs of spawning females from maturing. It’s not surprising that the only consistently healthy salmon runs left are those in the cold waters of Alaska.

The fact that salmon is still available in supermarkets, and is cheaper than it ever was, is no comfort. Ninety percent of the fresh salmon consumed in the United States is from farms, and I have come to believe that the farmed product is not a healthy alternative to wild.

Three Norwegian-owned companies dominate the salmon-farming industry in North America, and their offshore net-cages dot long stretches of the west coast of the Americas. In Chile, overcrowding in these oceanic feedlots led to this year’s epidemic of infectious salmon anemia, a disease that has killed millions of fish and left the flesh of survivors riddled with lesions.

The situation in Canada, which supplies the United States with 40 percent of its farmed salmon, is not much better. In British Columbia, offshore net-cages are breeding grounds for thumbtack-sized parasites called sea lice. In the Broughton Archipelago, a jigsaw of islands off the province’s central coast, wild pink salmon are infested with the crustaceans. Scientists think that the tens of millions of salmon in Broughton’s 27 Norwegian-owned farms are attracting sea lice and passing them on to wild fish, killing them. They say that this infestation could drive Broughton’s pink salmon to extinction by 2011.

To rid salmon of the lice, fish farmers spike their feed with a strong pesticide called emamectin benzoate, which when administered to rats and dogs causes tremors, spinal deterioration and muscle atrophy. The United States Food and Drug Administration, already hard-pressed to inspect imported Asian seafood for antibiotic and fungicide residues, does not test imported salmon for emamectin benzoate. In other words, the farmed salmon in nearly every American supermarket may contain this pesticide, which on land is used to rid diseased trees of pine beetles. It is not a substance I want in my body.

I avoid farmed salmon for other reasons. It takes four pounds of small fish like sardines and anchovies to make a single pound of farmed salmon, a process that deprives humans of precious protein. (Feedmakers have lately increased the proportion of soy in the pellets, which means the fish have even lower levels of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids.) Organic farmed salmon would be a good option, if the term meant something — outside Europe, there is still no credible, widely available eco-label for responsibly raised farmed salmon.