If you care about Scotland’s marine environment don’t eat battery-farmed salmon
Citizen scientists try to protect Scotland's "barrier reef"
Imagine a very special mountain meadow. It is carpeted with globally unique wildflowers whose root systems are 10,000 years old. They grow at one millimetre a year. Among them are exquisite butterflies, colourful insects, animals and birds. Imagine this meadow is the keystone of a fragile ecosystem.
But then imagine you haven’t visited the meadow for a few years. When you go back you are aghast to notice that someone has been strewing the whole area on a regular basis with dog shit and dog food. The plants are turning brown and dying. Everything is clogged with bits of dog shit or covered with a creeping white fungus. Instead of the fresh mountain breeze, the whole place stinks of rotten eggs.
You discover the area has been turned into a dog farm. These dogs are being heavily dosed with drugs and both their food and faeces are full of chemicals that are toxic to the butterflies and insects, which have all but disappeared. The birds that used to feed on them are also failing. In their place are thousands of huge rats who thrive on this dog food diet. The regime is effectively a mould-and-rat-nurturing programme. The whole ecosystem is being twisted out of shape.
You try to protest - but people call you insensitive. Two local people have jobs feeding the dogs. Lots of the dogs die - maybe 30 or 40% of them lie dead and rotting in the meadow, at any one time, half-eaten by the other dogs. Another local person has the job of collecting the carcasses and throwing them in a skip every couple of months. Who are you to threaten this employment? It may not pay much but this is a poor area.
The surviving dogs are killed and sold as incredibly cheap protein - you can buy a sack of frozen dog steaks for under a tenner. Cheap frozen dogmeat has become Scotland’s biggest export. Clearly, someone is making a lot of money out of the farms - but they live in Edinburgh or Norway. You have to pay a hell of a lot less tax to the government for the right to run a dog meat farm in Scotland than Norway - that’s why they moved their operation here.
This is basically what is happening to Scotland’s “barrier reef”, along the coast of northwest Scotland, in the sea lochs of Wester Ross, all around the Hebrides.
Scotland is home to the world’s largest area of a rare, pink seaweed called maerl. It takes thousands of years to grow and it thrives in clear water, which is sheltered from the tidal flow. It sequesters carbon. In its waving fronds live lots of tiny marine animals. That is where fish lay their eggs. The little fish find plenty of food and places to shelter here. Huge shoals of herring, cod, crab, and other species are born and grow within its embrace.
But it is dying. The powers that be decided to allow larger and larger fish farms in the exact same places where the maerl is. The tonnage of salmon being produced from Scotland’s salmon farms is going up and up and up. The death rates of the fish are going up sharply too and so is the density of the drifting clouds of food, shit, chemicals and plastic waste that each fish farm creates.
The risk assessment model that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Nature Scot used, back when they started to give permission for the farms was simplistic. They assumed that the sea would just wash all the shit away and it wouldn’t make a difference to the ecosystem. They were wrong.
Citizen scientists try to protect the magical meadows under the sea
Don’t take it from me - I attended a community meeting in Torridon recently where we watched an excellent half-hour documentary film by Sara Nason of Little Green Fims, about the work of Professor Jason Hall-Spencer, a leading expert on maerl. The film, Pink Maerl and Salmon Farms, explains his reasons for saying the modeling was wrong and that the maerl is being destroyed by the fishfarms. Watch it here
We also heard from a local citizen scientist, Peter Cunningham, of Wester Ross Fisheries Trust, who this summer surveyed by snorkeling a maerl bed in Loch Torridon which was last recorded in 2001. The maerl plants he found were covered with a kind of algae that is likely fostered by the fish farm nutrients. He didn’t find any of the tiny marine animals that should have been living in the seaweed, helping to keep it clean.
Cunningham reported: “In June 2001, a maerl bed was recorded at the east end of Loch Torridon during a Seasearch dive survey expedition in 2001. In June 2023, the maerl bed at the east end of upper Loch Torridon was revisited by snorkeling from the shore at low tide. Samples of maerl were collected to examine the filamentous algae growing on them; microscopic examination suggested possibly two or more species of filamentous algae were present….this may be harmful to the maerl, and may be an indication of nutrient enrichment of coastal waters.”
I asked Nature Scot for a comment about the effects of fish farms on maerl: They said: “NatureScot recognises that maerl beds are highly sensitive to some of the pressures associated with aquaculture, particularly organic enrichment and smothering. While historically some aquaculture sites have been located over maerl bed habitats, we take a strong stance on any new development that may result in impacts on this important habitat, and we will strongly advise regulators against consenting such developments.”
Long Live Loch Linnhe
Now plans are afoot for a megafarm in the fragile narrows of Loch Linnhe. There are maerl beds in that area too. As in many areas of the Highlands and Islands, it seems to be up to local residents to campaign to save the magical meadows under the sea. In Argyll, citizen scientists have formed a group called Long Live Loch Linnhe. They are producing research and materials to combat an attempt to put a semi-closed farm there. LLLL points out that to be economically viable it will have to pack salmon, once known as the King of Fish, into pens at a density of three times what the RSPCA recommends.
LLLL disputes proposer Loch Long Salmon’s claims: “Even if the new waste extraction technology works as proposed…the residual poo from so many fish is roughly equivalent to that from the entire population of Oban, entering the loch untreated at one location…. There is no attempt to capture the pee from the millions of fish; high levels of fish pee risk causing or exacerbating algal blooms.”
It is to be hoped this megafarm will not get permission - but even if it is refused, existing farms are unlikely to be challenged.
Bjork sings for the fish and top chefs remove the battery variety from their menus
Scotland is not the only country with issues around salmon farming - Bjork is concerned about the impact of farming on nature in her homeland and just released a fragment of a song where the proceeds will go to fight the industry in Iceland.
The Observer reported at the weekend that many of the UK’s leading chefs now refuse to serve farmed salmon because of concerns about the environmental impact and the quality of the product.
The combative response from Tavish Scott of Salmon Scotland was typical of this cowboy industry. He said: “With domestic and global demand for Scottish salmon continuing to grow, the success of the Scottish salmon sector – and the jobs that depend on it – will not be put at risk from a handful of urban-based activist chefs.”
So far the farmed salmon industry in Scotland has fought off protests and continued to grow. Existing farms have expanded and moved around their area, spreading their mess more widely. Beaches, too, are strewn with plastic fish farm debris. (Volunteers cleared Redpoint a year ago - this summer the sea was vomiting plastic fish farm equipment onto it again. It is unmarked and every farm denies it is theirs.)
Surely it would be right for the Scottish government to take a more cautious approach? There is a lot we don’t know about marine ecosystems. It is possible that damaging the maerl beds could have knock-on effects on the species that other parts of the fishing industry depend on. Maerl takes thousands of years to grow. If we prove a decade down the line that the modeling was wrong - how long will it take to repair the damage?
If people knew more about the underwater world perhaps they would care more. Proposals for a new national park for Scotland may include a coastal area - that could be an opportunity to educate people about pink maerl and all the life forms it supports.
Count me in as an "urban-based [surely that should just be 'urban'] activist' - no more farmed salmon for me now that I've read this.