From today's copy of "The Fishing Wire". See link at the end for the full article
Is Farmed Salmon Really Salmon?
By Mathew Berger
Nautilus Magazine
The fish market has become the site of an ontological crisis. Detailed labels inform us where each fillet is from or how it was caught or whether it was farmed or wild-caught. Although we can now tell the farmed salmon from the wild, the degree of differences or similarities between the two defies straightforward labels. When a fish—or any animal—is removed from its wild habitat and domesticated over generations for human consumption, it changes—both the fish and our perception of it. The farmed and wild both say "salmon" on their labels, but are they both equally "salmon?" When does the label no longer apply?
This crisis of identity is ours to sort out; not the fish's. For us, the salmon is an icon of the wild, braving thousand-mile treks through rivers and oceans, leaping up waterfalls to spawn or be caught in the clutches of a grizzly bear. The name "salmon" is likely derived from the Latin word, "salire," to leap. But it's a long way from a leaping wild salmon to schools of fish swimming in circles in dockside pens. Most of the salmon we eat today don't leap and don't migrate.
We now manage salmon's evolution—even to the point of genetically modifying them to grow faster.
More than 90 percent of all the adult Atlantic salmon now on the planet are thought to be in salmon farms and almost all Atlantic salmon available in the United States at your local market is from a farm. This rise of the farmed salmon, and the decline of native ones, is casting the definition of species into doubt and in the process tweaking our relationship to nature. In a 1998 paper, Mart Gross, a conservation biologist, called for the recognition of a new creature, Salmo domesticus.
"Domesticated salmon are about as different from wild salmon as dogs are from wolves," says Gross, a professor at the University of Toronto. Like dogs, these salmon now depend on humans for habitat and food, and we manage their evolution—even to the point of genetically modifying them to grow faster.
Salmon species aren't the first to undergo this identity shift at our hands, but the transformation from a wild to domestic species has seldom happened as quickly. We are watching this one unfold within a single human lifetime. To Gross and other scientists, the rapid transformation epitomizes our Anthropocene epoch, where nature can no longer be separated from humans.
Read the rest of this story in Nautilus Magazine here:
http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/is-farmed-salmon-really-salmon.- See more at:
http://www.thefishingwire.com/story/362288#sthash.hISkdLUb.dpuf