MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Salmon farming in Chile greater environmental threat than estimated

The salmon industry represents annual sales of 2 billion USD for Chile

Salmon farms in Chile are a worse threat to the environment than originally thought following on unexpected results from a German scientific research team studying communications among whales in the southern Pacific along Chilean Patagonia.

According to a report from the renowned Dynamics and Organization Department from Hanover’s Max Planck Institute and published in the latest edition of Nature, “there’s virtually no life in the areas surrounding Chilean salmon farms”.

Chile is one of the world’s leading producers of salmon with annual sales over 2 billion US dollars.

The Planck institute team headed by Heike Vester said that salmon farms are considered a serious environmental problem, “but so far have been underestimated”.

This apparently surfaced when the team researching the acoustic communication of whales in the Pacific came across the consequences caused by salmon farming.

Most of the salmon farming area in southern Chile is well protected for sanitary reasons on shore, but this is not the case at the majority of the fiords where the farms are located and which remain inaccessible from land.

Farming salmon not only demand medicines and pesticides but also produces massive volumes of faeces and rests of food which are left floating in the water. The Atlantic salmon also comes along with new diseases which threaten native species.

According to the German researchers water samples in areas adjoining the farms are completely dead, with virtually no symptoms of life.

“All along there’s this penetrating chlorine odour”, said Vester.

But besides the visible consequences such as the sea lions and other mammals trapped and strangled in the protection nets, scientists discovered an invisible threat for other mammals in the region.

Acoustic measurements showed that the engine noise from supply vessels and other machinery such as generators operating full time to feed the salmon interfere with the communications system of whales and porpoises and scares them away.