Canadian Imperialist Salmon

[jhetley]

Some damnfool cut the nets at a 'Quoddy Bay, New Brunswick salmon farm and released 20,000 (estimate) mature Atlantic salmon. Which are now swamping the gene-pool of the few, the proud, the harried wild Atlantic salmon in Downeast Maine. Which, in turn, are about the only wild Atlantic salmon in the whole USA.

Fish-farm salmon are designed to produce meat, not survive in the wild.

I wrote a short story about this, SF rather than fantasy, about ten-fifteen years back. Nobody bought it.

Comments

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Hey,

salmon want to be free, too, eh?

Makes as much sense as "freeing" the flock of chickens across the way from me, I suspect.

[ellyssian.livejournal.com]

Curious - was the damnfool doing the cutting on porpoisepurpose or was it an accident?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

According to the news report*, this was a deliberate act of industrial sabotage. What relationship wooden shoes have to salmon farms, I don't know.

Yeah, I imagine the porpoises and seals enjoy dining on fat and stupid farm-fish.

*I've learned to regard the local newspaper with a skeptical squint -- almost every time I've had personal knowlege of a news story, they've gotten something wrong. Latest example, a photo of a kid playing in the park (town commons) we can see out our back window. They got the park name wrong.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Gaah.

This is about as intelligent as freeing all those farmed minks a few years back.

[nathelmi.livejournal.com]

If those salmon are GE'd, and the genes are patented, does that mean we'll have to pay royalties if we catch the offspring of wild fish and the released organo-property?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I think the fish are straight selective-breeding products, rather than genetically engineered.* But your jape may have teeth -- I've seen report of patent lawsuits from gene-mod corn crossing with other varieties.

(*I wish people would come up with another bit of shorthand than the registered trademark of General Electric. Headline seen -- "Village Bans GE Products." Plays hell with my retirement portfolio, I tell you.)

[anghara.livejournal.com]

It's about as wonderfully intelligent as the idiot who decided to import Australian possums into New Zealand in order to start a fur industry, and then released his stock, *un-neutered*, into the wild in NZ when the business failed. There was nothing like the possum in NZ at the time, and they absolutely exploded, and began to eradicate the ground-nesting native birds (among other things) now there's a hundred thousand possums loose and a favourite NZ saying, in the manner of the American wild west once upon a time, is that the only good possum is a dead possum.

Pity they didn't think about that when they thought releasing the critters was a good idea...