Can We Find A Cure?
Shooting Times & Country|January 3,2018

Wild Atlantic salmon stocks are suffering so we must change our ways, says Will Martin, who offers an alternative to the king of fish

Will Martin
Can We Find A Cure?

Salmon numbers have dropped like a stone.” This chilling pronouncement silenced the audience at the Curzon Theatre in Mayfair, London.

The Editor and I were at the Atlantic Salmon Trust’s (AST) Christmas drinks to see a new film, Lost at Sea. The Trust — founded in 1967 in response to concerns over exploitation of wild salmon in the Faroes and the waters of eastern Greenland — now strives to protect our wild Atlantic salmon and sea trout. Using modern acoustic tracking projects and state-of-the-art scientific gene monitoring, the Trust, in collaboration with universities and international organisations, is now trying to discover where our salmon are being lost.

Working as a gillie, I heard many reasons for the decline; from too many seals to loss and destruction at sea, from over-fishing to a population explosion of mergansers. But one reason kept cropping up — the practices of salmon farms. There are 530million salmon farmed every year around the world, compared with 3million wild Atlantic salmon.

Open-caged aquaculture in its current form produces one more barrier to our wild fish as they embark on their journey to their adult feeding grounds. To learn more I asked Sarah Slater, AST executive director.

Hello Sarah, how did you get involved in the AST?

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