Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 2 (IPS) – Canada’s open-ocean salmon farms are killing enormous numbers of wild salmon, threatening the species, a new study shows.

Research published Monday found that sea lice — a fish parasite — from salmon farms along the British Columbia coast kill up to 95 percent of the wild juvenile salmon as they head out to sea.

“It is a startling conclusion,” said Alexandra Morton, a biologist with the Raincoast Research Society and co-author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We are not going to have any wild salmon at this rate,” Morton told IPS.

—Inter Press News Service