GreenWatch

B. McPherson This video is quite long, but it is a real eye opener about "organic prawns" The Blue Revolution is the set of lies told to the public about the sustainability of fish farming. It includes fables about the farming of shrimp and prawns as well. Industrialists that own the “farms” have been tireless in repeating the story. The open net fish farming industry has shown how disease is concentrated in the feed lot of the nets. Waste from the fish drops to the ocean floor and contributes to pollution. The overcrowded conditions require the heavy use of antibiotics to keep disease at bay. And often, that is not enough. Currently, on the west coast of British Columbia, millions of farmed Atlantic salmon have been killed because they are infected with a deadly virus. They promised us cheap fish if we accepted the farm leases in our clean coastal waters. Ever wonder what those farmed fish eat? They eat wild fish. Not salmon. The industry would claim...

B. McPherson Are you one to buy and eat farmed Atlantic salmon? You know, the kind that you can buy in nearly every supermarket and Costco? It comes with a lower price tag than our diminishing stocks of wild salmon. You may get a bonus with the farmed fish – a parasite that can turn fish flesh into mush. When farmed salmon first hit the supermarket coolers, some people remarked on the cheapness of it while others turned their noses up saying that the flesh was “too soft”. It was speculated that the fish didn’t get enough exercise to develop firm muscles. Then a nasty little secret started to leak out. Some farmed salmon contained a bacterium that turned the flesh to mush. Now, due to a local TV station doing some undercover reporting, it’s no longer an industry secret. The bacterium is Kudoa thyrsites and it has been described as rather like a time bomb that affects the farmed salmon flesh after the fish has been killed and cut up for sale. This is, of course, different ...

B. McPherson

By B. McPherson A deadly virus has been found in wild Pacific salmon. The virus, identified as a European strain has never before been detected in the Pacific Ocean. Young stunted sockeye salmon sampled near a concentration of open net fish farms were found to carry the deadly virus. The highly infectious microbe causes heavy losses of Atlantic salmon from Norway to Chile in the Atlantic. It is speculated that infected fish eggs were imported from Iceland. When fish are infected with the infectious salmon anemia (ISA) they lose the ability to carry oxygen in their blood and die a slow and painful death. In the wild, a sick salmon would be quickly scooped up by a predator, but in the densely packed net farms, they live for much longer, shedding viral particles for much longer, infecting those around them. Once infected, there is no treatment. The virus, first observed in fish farms in 1984 is not normally seen in the wild and its wild reservoir is not well known. In the area off Van...