Can We Find A Cure?

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

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?