GreenWatch

B. McPherson Tinkering with the ocean's fertility can bring unintended consequences. The Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation has paid about $2 million to dump 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean 300 km offshore of the Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlottes) Islands. This has resulted in a giant algal bloom that can be seen from space. The algae treat iron as a fertilizer and can divide rapidly when given enough nutrients. The experiment has been deemed a success by the salmon restoration corporation and reckless by others. The logic that an algal bloom would enhance salmon health is unclear, as salmon are carnivores. Iron sulphate has been proposed to geoengineer the world’s oceans to push the algae to grow more rapidly, absorb more carbon out of the air and help stave off global warming. On a very simple level, this might sound like a good idea, but when an algal bloom(huge numbers of single celled plants) dies, they are decomposed by oxygen eating bacteria...

B.McPherson  A deadly virus has hit one salmon farm on the west coast of Vancouver Island and has been found in a second one off the west coast of BC known as the Sunshine Coast. Over half a million fish have been killed in the Vancouver Island fish raising operation. The virus when it infects the farmed Atlantic salmon is always fatal. The infectious haemapoietic necrosis is occasionally found in wild Pacific salmon but is not a problem if they encounter the virus in low concentrations. The crowded, net farmed salmon on the other hand, build up viral particles in such numbers that the only solution is to take them out of the water and kill them. The storm of viral particles floats freely and is able to then infect the wild salmon. There are 131 fish raising operations in the cold, clean Pacific coastal waters. Raising fish in open nets is a multi-million dollar business, mostly run by foreign owned corporations.There are fears that the epidemic will spread throughout...

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...