Atlantic don't belong in the Pacific

While forest fires rage in the Western United States and hurricanes batter the East Coast, we have had our own disaster here in the Salish Sea. The release of hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon into our waters here created an ecological disaster on a scale that we have not seen in the Salish Sea before.

One week after their release this invasive species had been found as far south as the Nisqually River, as far North as the Fraser River and on the coast of Vancouver Island. I and other Swinomish fishers caught Atlantic salmon in our own Skagit River. We found both males and females. They are hungry and already competing with our native salmon for food.

Spurred to action by the scale or release that Lummi fishers observed when they visited the derelict Cypress Island net pen, Swinomish and other tribes mobilized a dramatic race against time to try to capture as many of these fish as as quickly as they could. The State of Washington eventually urged sport anglers to go after these fish. That may have sounded like a good idea at first, but the presence of hundreds of small boats complicated the recovery effort the tribes had mounted by making it more difficult to deploy commercial nets. Nonetheless, tribal first responders the Lummi, the Swinomish and other treaty tribes continued catching these invasive fish over that first week.

Cooke Aquaculture owns the floating factory fish farm at Cypress Island and several others in Washington’s waters. They are a billion-dollar company out of Eastern Canada, operating fish farms around the world. They purchased the aging infrastructure of Icicle Seafoods last year. Despite observing that the pens at Cypress Island were in disrepair they waited for this year’s harvest of overstocked fish to make the needed investments. The results were disastrous.

We have never had a release of factory fish of this magnitude in Washington State. We do not know what the long-term implications of this escape will be. Will they destroy local spawning habitat? Eat younger salmon? Pollute the gene stock of our wild fish creating some new kind of hybrid?

A truly sad part of this tragedy is that our state was completely unprepared to respond. The leases and permits issued by state agencies required a spill response plan, but it was decades out of date. Inadequate as it was, even it was not implemented. The State agencies were confused about who was in charge and took more than a week to stand up an Incident Command Center to oversee the cleanup of what they called the release of a pollutant into our water.

Here’s the thing: those fish should not have been here in the first place. Yes, Swinomish and other tribes have participated in raising Atlantic salmon in net pens in the past, but we have learned a lot since then and know now that they cannot be safely raised here. It is not a question of if there will be releases, but when.

It’s time to follow the lead of the other states on the West Coast and ban commercial net pens for raising fish in Washington.