Anger over latest escape of young salmon

Ken Jones
March 6, 2010
The Press and Journal (Scottish Press) 

A demand was made yesterday for fish farms to be moved away from wild salmon rivers or to be put in self-contained land-based units after up to 100,000 salmon smolts escaped into a Highland loch.

A leading fishery board official warned: “Indigenous fish could be driven into extinction before someone has the sense to put a stop to this madness. With yet another disastrous escape like this, we are rapidly getting closer to that day.”

Juvenile Atlantic smolts, each weighing 70gms, escaped through a hole in a net at a Marine Harvest fish farm in freshwater Loch Lochy, in the Great Glen near Fort William, at the end of February.

The latest incident has been condemned by the Association of Salmon Fishery Boards and the Rivers and Fisheries Trusts, which say it comes on the back of a year that had seen the highest number of escapes in the past five years.

Read the full story in "The Press and Journal" (Scotland)