Last week the aquaculture industry’s favorite propaganda news site, SeaWestNews, released an article proposing a self-proclaimed radical idea to recover the northwest’s starving Southern Resident killer whales— chase the whales down in boats and try to force them to eat farmed Atlantic salmon.
While not a serious proposal, this tongue-in-cheek satire is undoubtedly an attempt to paint net pen aquaculture in a positive light to a public increasingly concerned about the risks the industry poses to critically endangered orcas and their prey.
Photo: NOAA
The industry insiders offer vague descriptions of how this supplemental feeding of farmed Atlantic salmon would work and no scientific data to support the idea, further suggesting that this is not a serious plan but an attempt to exploit starving killer whales for profit.
They point to the example of Springer, an emaciated Northern Resident killer whale who in the early 2000's was fed a diet that included farmed Atlantic salmon as part of her rehabilitation before being reintroduced into the wild.
While Springer was taken into captivity for her feedings, we can be glad the aquaculture industry doesn’t suggest rearing whales in net pens. Instead, the article suggests large vessels carrying farmed fish could be driven straight into the whale’s foraging areas, an idea that directly contradicts coastwide efforts and legislation to reduce vessel noise in close proximity to the whales.
While not mentioned in the article, both scientists quoted as supporting this approach serve as board members or advisors to the Northwest Aquaculture Alliance, the very group that would stand to profit from marketing farmed fish as feed for killer whales.
The industry promoters flaunted this Swiftian idea again this week in another pro-aquaculture publication where their claims diverted even further from science. First, distastefully holding up marine parks as great examples of orcas adapting to new diets, and then suggesting that like other wild animals whose habitat and prey have been reduced by humans, whales can simply adapt to be dependent on humans for food, likening the whales to trash pillaging bears, and apparently, farmed Atlantic salmon to garbage.
Most egregious is that both articles attempt to circumvent well-established evidence that open water net pen aquaculture contributes to the decline of the Southern Resident’s primary food source, wild Chinook salmon. By exposing Chinook and other wild salmon populations to harmful pathogens, rampant pollution, and escaped farmed fish, open water net pens pose an enormous threat to the survival of the northwest’s killer whales.
And beyond impacts to Chinook, open water net pens also expose orcas to a variety of other environmental risks. Often located in killer whale and salmon migration corridors, net pens require Southern Residents and other whales to navigate dangerous underwater infrastructure such as long cables protruding hundreds of feet out from the pens underwater.
The industry’s vessels expose migrating whales to underwater noise pollution at close distances that further reduce the whale’s ability to successfully navigate and locate prey.
Video footage captured by Bainbridge Island residents, a group of transient orca whales swam are seen swimming in dangerous proximity to one of Cooke Auquacultur’s rich passage net pens.
Further, as northwest communities work to reduce toxins that further imperil emaciated Southern Residents, this industry has a poor environmental track record when it comes to abiding by local and federal water quality laws.
This “modest proposal” is another example of how far the aquaculture industry is willing to go to profit at the expense of the northwest’s wild salmon and killer whales.