6. Krkosek et al.

"Declining Wild Salmon Populations in relation to Parasites from Farm Salmon" examines the impact of farmed salmon parasites on wild salmon. Because farm salmon sometimes escape into the wild, they transport the salmon lice prevalent in farming environments with them into wild salmon habitats.

The reasons for salmon farming are many. For one, it's far more cost-effective to concentrate salmon populations in a few bodies of water than to pay fishermen to hunt for them in the wild. Population concentration allows for easier regulation by food agencies such as the FDA because the farmers can control diet and population health. However, concentrating the population also significantly increases the risk of epidemic, such as this article documents.

Martin Krkosek and his team of scientists have monitored the areas where wild salmon populations come into contact with farmed salmon for quite some time. Their observations recorded a steady decline in some wild salmon populations near Vancouver, Canada. They noticed, as well, that the populations in decline were located near any of the several salmon farms in Vancouver.

Hypothesizing that the farmed salmon were impacting the wild salmon populations, Krkosek and his team tried to isolate a cause for which they could test. They discovered that the salmon louse, a parasite historically contained to domestic populations, was escaping and spreading rapidly in the wild. The mortality rate is already over 80% in wild salmon who are exposed to the salmon louse, and it is expected that the mortality rate will continue to rise. In fact, Krkosek expects that within ten generations, or 20 years, wild salmon will be extinct.

This species, in effect, is already dead. Our kids won't eat pink salmon. There's little that we can do about this, because the problem is already too great. What we can do, however, is consider how our actions are affecting other species. We face a catch-22: the whole reason we started farming salmon (or anything) was to provide a safe, fast food source to which we had easy access. The cost, we now realize, is sev ere to the salmon at least. And do we really want to be the species that kills off other species? We have real needs; our societies - as complicated and diverse as they are - cannot simply return to subsistence farming and some sort of hunter/gather lifestyle. But we are not blameless; we have not done everything we could to protect the species we use. This research, and other research like it, is a call to action. We have killed the salmon, but we may learn from this experience. There are safer farming methods designed to protect wild populations.The near-extinction of salmon is proof enough of this, and brings to mind the dodo, the buffalo, sperm whales, the wooly mammoth even. We've done this before, and - unless we collectively think about our choices - we'll do this again.

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