A SCOTTISH fish farm company has paid out more than\u00a0 \u00a313,000 compensation in a unique out of court settlement after admitting it accidentally released juvenile salmon into a river system with a risk of polluting the wild strain of fish.<\/p>\n
Mainstream Scotland, a subsidiary of the Norwegian salmon conglomerate CERMAQ,\u00a0 paid the money to the\u00a0 Forth District Salmon Fishery Board (FDSFB) after being presented with \u201cincontrovertible evidence\u201d that smolts from its land-based facility at Fossaway Bridge in Clackmannanshire had escaped into the River Devon, a tributary of the Forth.<\/p>\n
The FDSFB said salmon farm escapees carried the threat of disease and posed a real threat of diluting the genetics of wild fish. \u201cThese factors have the potential to compromise severely the survival fitness of wild fish,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
The case represents another pollution scalp for Fish Legal, formerly the Anglers\u2019 Conservation Association.\u00a0 Its Scottish solicitor, Robert Younger, told Between The Lines<\/span> today:<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a unique result.\u00a0 It is the first case of a successful claim for a freshwater land-based escape of fish and is important because it demonstrates that we are prepared to fight pollution wherever it happens.<\/p>\n \u201cFish farmers must be made to pay for the costs of the pollution caused by their industry.\u201d<\/p>\n Fish Legal was first approached Mainstream last autumn. They responded with an out and out denial, according to Younger, despite the fact that\u00a0 the smolts were found upstream of a waterfall that is impassable to wild salmon.<\/p>\n Presented with evidence from Marine Scotland, Sepa and the results of DNA testing, the fish farm company admitted liability and agreed to settle the FDSFB costs and the expenses of cleaning up the river.<\/p>\n Patrick Fothringham, director of the River Forth Fisheries Trust, said: \u201cAs far as we are aware this is the first example in Scotland of an escape from a so-called \u2018closed containment unit.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cThe company maintains that it was adhering to the salmon farming industry\u2019s much-vaunted code of good practice.\u00a0 If it was, the fish still managed to escape.<\/p>\n \u201cThis suggests that, as many of us have argued for years, this code falls far short of being fit for purpose in terms of minimising the impact on wild fish.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrew Wallace, managing director of the Association of Salmon Fishery Boards (ASFB) said: \u201cThis episode should be seen as a warning shot across the bows of the freshwater aquaculture industry where a culture of \u2018out of sight, out of mind\u2019 has been allowed to develop.\u201d<\/p>\n He said the ASFB was currently looking at other escapes on the Tay, Awe, and Garry systems and four freshwater lochs on the Isle of Lewis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A SCOTTISH fish farm company has paid out more than\u00a0 \u00a313,000 compensation in a unique out of court settlement after admitting it accidentally released juvenile salmon into a river system with a risk of polluting the wild strain of fish. Mainstream Scotland, a subsidiary of the Norwegian salmon conglomerate CERMAQ,\u00a0 paid the money to the\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btl.longlinemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}