Salmon fillets on sale at a market (Photo credits: GEEKworld) Salmon has always been an essential to the world of cooking. Some may even claim its a miracle food, packed with omega-3 fatty acids and essential amino acids, it is a wonderful and nutritious ingredient that goes well on any dinner table. With the many qualities that makes salmon a potential candidate for best-food-ever, it comes as no surprise that salmon is one of the most over-fished aquatic life. However, its worse than ever before and it may even be history at the time you're reading this article.
Salmon is well-known for its reproductive cycle, they are born in fresh water, migrate to the ocean, then return to fresh water to mate, returning to its birth place to lay their eggs and mate. Salmon are essential to the ecology of the location of spawning as well, they are a great food source to bears that commonly travel to the fresh water streams the salmon spawn in. This is where most of the wild salmon is fished by humans as well. Salmon eggs/roe, a delicacy in Japanese cuisine, is also collected here. This is where the problem begins, fishing of salmon here, before the salmon is allowed to spawn, is extremely detrimental to salmon populations. Since people have realised the unsustainability of salmon fishing, people have turned to aquaculture, farming salmon to continue to feed the ever-increasing demand. Now we have to answer the question of if salmon aquaculture sustainable. Well in short, it's questionable. Farming of salmon has brought new issues to the table. Farming of salmon requires large areas of space. This causes the need for destruction of habitats such as mangrove swamps and reefs for salmon farming. Needless to say, this is bad for the environment. In commercial farming of salmon, various steroids such as growth hormones and antibiotics are used. This allows larger and stronger salmon to be farmed to maximise yield. This however, may cause certain allergies to be formed and may cause antibiotic-resistances to be formed in bacteria. Salmon are also genetically modified with genes of larger salmon species or eels to create larger offspring. This can destroy the balance in ecosystems if released into the wild, potentially allowing these modified salmon to move up the food chain and destroy the balance in the ecosystem. Finally, the farming of salmon in an enclosed area will allow rapid spread of diseases. The most common and most disastrous disease is ISA (Infectious salmon anemia virus). This infectious disease now infects large fisheries in Canada, Norway, and many more. This infectious disease can cause a wipe-out of a salmon farm, completely destroying any future salmon produce. The multimillionaire salmon industry has taken a deep plunge into the pit of despair and is most likely going to fail in the coming years. Some say salmon is a lost case and will most likely be gone within a few decades.
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