Sitting at Billy’s dining room table, the conversation had turned to the subject of salmon hatcheries.
Allegedly, the government provides open-pen salmon farms in BC (an industry with $440m in sales,) between $4m and $5m per year in return for dead fish.
Considering salmon hatcheries are potentially part of the solution to dwindling wild salmon stocks, I was surprised to hear how little investment they require.
It turns out that in his tireless efforts to keep the community – where he was born and has lived all his life – alive, he helped found a privately funded salmon hatchery in the area a few years ago.
Challenges of Remote Locations
After some early successes, the hatchery is no longer in operation. The location wasn’t perfect – the local stream turned out to be inadequate for their needs and the workaround was expensive – fry had to be helicoptered to other areas.
But he told me that in the end, difficulty in finding staff willing to work at the hatchery became the biggest issue.
I found this difficult to believe. How hard could it be to recruit a handful of people to this admittedly remote, but beautiful, place to do valuable conservation work? But Billy insisted it was true – another sign of not just how difficult it is to keep the salmon population alive but also the communities that used to depend upon them.
Defunct, But Dead in the Water?
The hatchery is overgrown with trees and brush now, and when I visited their winter branches made a net-like pattern out of which the outline of the building emerges.
Billy explained the process to me as I took pictures – salmon eggs were hatched in custom-made perforated plastic substrates and then incubated to a certain size before being released into the rivers to which they eventually return to spawn.
Most of the equipment is still there, to my eyes just waiting for someone to walk in and restart the whole thing.
Future of Hatchery Funding
So how much investment did it take to get this whole thing started? I was able to piece together a ballpark figure based upon what Billy told me after some coaxing – about $150,000. That is about 4% of what our government gives to the open-pen farms in exchange for dead fish every year. Or put another way, the money spent on dead fish could instead be spent on 25 or so hatcheries – more than doubling the current number – (or fewer combined with other helpful stuff like habitat reclamation projects.)
Something to think about.
Did You Know
Fish hatcheries are widely regarded as a legitimate strategy for helping to maintain wild fish stocks.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have established a National Fish Hatchery System to support the conservation of native fish species.
Environmental Impacts
Despite the use of hatcheries to support wild stocks, many are focused on supplying fish farms. There is widespread debate about the potential negative impacts of open-pen fish farms in the wild environment.
Possible negative impacts of the widespread release of hatchery fish into the ocean to support wild stocks include the artificial promotion of one (hatchery supported) species over others, and the potential for lack of genetic diversification across the fish released.
Health Impacts
Including fish as part of your diet has well-recorded health benefits although care should be taken as some varieties are high in toxins as a result of pollution in the environment. Wild salmon is generally regarded to be healthier than farmed salmon due to a lower risk of PCB contamination.
Lessons Learned
Fish hatcheries can be an important part of maintaining wild fish stocks, providing coastal communities with direct employment opportunities and supporting local fisheries. They require relatively little capital investment to start and maintain.
What You Can Do
Find out about your government’s support of fish hatcheries as part of maintaining wild fish stocks. Advocate for this strategy as a method of conservation and socio-economic support of coastal communities.
