23 February 2017
Catch Me If You Can
So where are all the fish?
by J.R.Thomas
Dr Johnson did not think much of fishermen. “A fishing rod,” he said, “is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.” There are many fishermen who would agree with him, but they still sit by waters in their millions, hoping that something may attach itself and be taken home proudly for supper. The crème de la crème of these fools are salmon fishermen, to be found in greater numbers the further one travels north; with the best salmon fishing, at the greatest expense, being found on the great Scottish rivers.
River waters are generally owned by the landowners who own the adjacent banks, as far as the centre of the river. This has been a great source of income to the great Scottish estates, and to some northern English ones, who rent or lease the fishing rights by the day or week or season to the fishermen. But the riparian owner does not own the fish in the water. The fish is a free agent and swims hither and thither and even, in the salmon’s case, spends quite a lot of time out at sea in the mid-Atlantic. He – or she – returns annually to the same river in one of those extraordinary feats of nature which we so little understand, to spawn and feed and amuse the fisherpersons on the banks. But therein lies a problem.
Less and less salmon are returning to the rivers they regard as their summer homes, and the numbers of fish caught has been in decline for many years, especially in Scotland. To start with, this was blamed on the net fisheries – who operated in waters at the river mouths, catching the sleek shiny monsters in nets, on a vast scale. Very unsporting. The salmon industry is not without resources (there are said to be five ducal riparian owners on the Tweed alone) and most of the net fisheries were bought out in the 1980’s and 1990’s and the netting stopped. That reversed the decline but not for long, so many owners imposed severe restrictions on the catch that could be kept by anglers – with most fish and all those under a certain size having to be returned to the waters from which they had just been seduced. What the salmon thought of playing a game of tag involving a hook, and then being chucked back, is not recorded. That did not do much to stop the decline, and detailed studies revealed that the decline was much worse on the Scottish west coast discharging rivers than on the east. Then the penny dropped.
Fish farming. The west coast lochs are now scarred, or enhanced, depending on your perspective, with great rafts of floating cages, complete with little huts, yellow and orange mysterious devices, and RIBS whizzing back and forth with supplies and men and chemicals – and fish.
You may not have seen the cages but if you enjoy salmon for lunch or dinner or sushi or smoked with scrambled egg for brekkers you have benefitted from their productivity. Salmon is cheap, not quite so cheap as bacon but as readily available. We are back to the days of the eighteenth century when the City of London apprentice boys petitioned against and marched in protest at been fed so much salmon; not more than twice a week was their cry. Yet by the 1960’s salmon was so special and so expensive that a fisherman friend of the author’s grandmother would wrap up a whole freshly caught salmon and dispatch it by overnight train from Aberdeen to York, where it would be joyfully met and driven to a cool larder in the North Riding for the delight of local friends and relations, a very special treat.
Now we are back to eating salmon every day as a cheap form of protein – not fished out of the Thames or Tyne (two major salmon rivers in the eighteenth century), but scooped up in a form of semi-industrial processing in a Scottish sea-loch. It is best maybe not to think about what those noisy apprentice boys were eating filtered through their fish, but what we are eating via farmed fish is not that great either. Salmon are creatures used to immense activity, swimming into the mid-Atlantic and back, thrashing those powerful silvery tails up rivers, jumping clean out of the water to get over obstacles in the water. (For an eye opening demonstration of the power in a tail fish, visit the fish ladders at Pitlochry where the salmon leap their way up a power station concrete fish ladder to reach their spawning grounds further up the Tay.) But in a fish farm they are confined to cages, like aquatic battery hens. Aggressive behaviour is common, the fish grow fat and their muscle tone wastes, and disease spreads rapidly. Flu on a tube train has nothing on disease in a fish farm.
And from the perspective of those river owners, and the people who stand in the rivers with very expensive rods and reels, the fish farms are very bad news indeed. The wild fish swim up the sea lochs past the fish cages and the farmed fish occasionally escape. This leads to interbreeding with the wild salmon which may well be mucking up their radars as to which ducal river they are supposed to be heading to, and of course spreads the farmed cousin’s diseases into the wild fish. It is not surprising that the numbers of wild fish are in steep decline. And many salmon experts (every fisher in possession of a rod and a landing net is an expert) think that interbreeding means already that there is no such thing as a truly wild salmon. Whether that matters is another thing.
Readers with queasy stomachs, consider reading no further. There is a new problem in those floating cages. And it is a problem at the moment to which there seems no clear solution, though the fish farms of Norway, who are the leaders in most things to do with salmon farming and indeed own or operate a lot of the Scottish farms, are researching hard. The fish are being attacked by sea lice, a cousin of those who create such panics in schools, but bigger – the size of a 5 pence piece. The sea lice attach themselves to the bodies of the salmon and live on it as a slowly diminishing host, eventually either killing it or rending it liable to some other infection which finishes it off. Chemicals do not seem to have much effect, other than on bird life and other seawater dwellers, though the industry is certainly trying its best. The amount used of the most popular (with fish farmers) chemical, azamethiphos, has gone up ten times in the last ten years; and still the lice spread. There are arguments as to whether azamethiphos lingers long term in water (the industry says it doesn’t), but it is not nice stuff and it is not working. The newest technique is to abandon chemical treatments and introduce natural parasites – of the lice, not the fish, or the fishermen. Trials with fish that eat the lice and will live with the salmon are so far going well, though conservationists worry about this rebalancing of nature and the river fisher folk would just like to see the farms gone so that the wild salmon might, hopefully, return. The SNP Scottish government would also like the problem sorted – salmon revenues have gone the way of oil revenues, not good news for aspirations to independence.
In the meantime the price of farmed salmon has gone up considerably to reflect diminishing supply and is likely to stay that way as costs of lice management go up. And if you prefer the superior taste of wild salmon? Soon, the only way could be back to that 1960’s technique – ask a fishing friend to stick one on an overnight express to collect at the diner’s station. Cool weather preferable.
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