Spawning Freaks of Nature

An Honest Look at Fish Farming

BY MICHAEL MILSTEIN

MAANDALEN, Norway -- The Maana River tumbles from ice-clad peaks past farms and pastures to Norway's fabled fjords. Aage Wold grew up fishing its wild salmon, as much an icon in Norway as in the Pacific Northwest.

But today many of the Maana's fish frighten him. They are strangers that spread lethal parasites. Once hooked, they have no fight -- just dead weight. Reeled in, they display pot bellies and stunted fins.

Things went so wrong on the Maana that government biologists poisoned the river -- a desperate attempt to kill everything with gills and start over, inviting Norway's regal native salmon back.

But the freakish strangers keep coming. They are farmed Atlantic salmon, escaping like a torrent from pens floating in the fjords below. Like all salmon, instinct leads them upriver to spawn, and they arrive here. 

Salmon farming began in Norway three decades ago. It boomed beyond all expectations and spread around the world. The Maana's trauma paints a cautionary portrait: a postcard-worthy river filled with escaped livestock fattened on pellets, with no link to its natural history or seasons. Like aliens in a B-movie, they overrun the residents, claiming their food and territory and running them out.

"When you see what's happening here, you have to be worried," says Wold, a retired farmer who labored to build sheltering pools for precious wild salmon. "For hundreds of years, our fish are made by this river. Now we are afraid we will lose them."

For every wild salmon in Norway, about 300 farmed Atlantics crowd a floating pen. Many get out -- 550,000 last year, according to federal figures. More than 80 percent of the large salmon hooked on the Maana last year -- and one of every three caught in Norway -- grew not in the wild North Sea, but on a farm.

Everything about salmon farming is huge. It's worth billions of dollars worldwide. Imported farmed salmon account for 80 percent of fresh salmon sold in the United States, shoving wild Northwest salmon out of the market. New farms are planned here in Norway, and in Canada and Chile.

Norway's some 800 salmon farms unleash not only escapees, but also other key environmental challenges.

Salmon at a large farm may eat 15 tons a day. Their food pellets are made from fish such as anchovies and jack mackerel caught in such massive volumes around the world that biologists fear it could disrupt life for other marine species. The salmon process them so rapidly that Norway's fish farms pour more fecal pollution into the ocean than the humans in all the nation's cities combined.

Salmon farmers are taking aggressive steps to control escapes and disease by devising better nets and chemical treatments, and using scavenger fish to remove parasites. Regulators in other countries say they have learned from Norway's example and will avoid the same troubles.

But even in Norway, where environmental ravages have proved costly and unmistakable, the struggle for reform is slow.

"We have learned what the impacts are," says Arne Sivertsen, who monitors farms for Norway's Directorate of Nature Management. "But nobody wants to listen to us. It is considered that this industry is very important in this small country. Nobody wants to stop it."

Promising trade, at first It all started in a rocky cove on Hitra, a wind-swept island along Norway's central coast. Storms riding off the North Sea have worn its outcrops smooth and left its trees huddling against the wind.

Two brothers, fishermen Sivert and Ove Grontvedt, built the first floating salmon pen on Hitra in about 1970. It seemed an ideal way to earn a living from fish without spending lonely months at sea.

The Grontvedts nailed their pens together from lumber. They bought their first crop of fish from government hatcheries and fed it ground, frozen bait fish. They hauled in the nets and collected grown salmon by hand.

It was inventive, clever -- and hugely promising as a cottage industry to offset already declining wild fisheries. The government sought to help farms flourish, not hamper them with regulations.

Sivert Grontvedt shared his knowledge and gained a reputation as the father of salmon farming. Even he was amazed how fast Norway expanded its output. Farms now lace fjords and channels from southern Norway to above the Arctic Circle. And more salmon come from Hitra's pens, still, than its fishing boats.

A single farm the size of a football field may hold nearly 1 million fish, more than all the country's wild salmon. Farmed salmon now outnumber Norway's 4.6 million people roughly 50-to-1.

But diseases and parasites invaded the pens and exploded into epidemics. Cold water vibriosis, which causes oozing ulcers on fish, so devastated farms around Hitra about 10 years ago that it's still widely known as "Hitra disease."

Now controlled with vaccines, it killed many of the Grontvedts' salmon. The brothers endured massive losses and finally sold out.

Tiny parasites called sea lice, commonly found on wild salmon in small numbers, feed on salmon flesh and use farming pens as breeding grounds.

Lice multiply swiftly amid the confined fish: A single female produces 8,000 or more eggs. Just two months later, those eggs are an army of adults bearing their own eggs. The lice are ravenous, latching onto wild salmon migrating to sea and gnawing into them.

About 10 years ago, fishermen began finding young wild fish with their gills eaten away by lice. Just a few lice compromise salmon enough that they cannot resist disease. In some fjords dotted by farms, researchers found, fewer than one in 10 wild salmon made it out to sea in some years.

"A small salmon doesn't have the strength to withstand a large number of lice," says Bengt Finstad, a research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.

In roaming beyond the reach of drug treatments in the pen, escaped fish become untouchable carriers of lice and disease. Fish imported to Norway in 1975, the early days of farming, brought a foreign parasite that multiplies while it feasts on salmon.

Today's farmed salmon are far different from the ones the Grontvedt brothers bought from the hatchery. They are livestock, bred in patented family lines to grow fast and mature late so they can hit maximum weight before slaughter.

But their resilience disproved many theories.

Many assumed that salmon hatched in plastic trays and raised on pellets could never fend for themselves in the wild. But when storms or accidents tore nets and they fled, they proved otherwise.

Even if they survived, it was believed, they would never find their way up rivers to spawn. But they did.

And even if they wandered upriver, the predictions said, never would they master the art of reproduction. But they did that, too.