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Monday, March 26, 2007
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Closing salmon escape routes

DENMARK - Icing, operating errors and lack of knowledge of currents and waves led to escapes from fish farms last year. But countermeasures are now being put into effect.

According to official statistics, a million fish escaped from Norwegian fish farms in 2006. The aquaculture industry has asked SINTEF to look at the causes of the escapes in eight cases that together were responsible for half of the escapees.

Most escapes were due to a combination of different factors. SINTEF says that there is good reason to believe that wrong assumptions about the impact of environmental forces such as ice, currents and ocean waves either triggered or contributed to the causes of six of the eight escapes studied. According to the report, operating error was a contributory factor in five cases.

Guidelines for countermeasures

Several of the findings of the study have already led to changes in standards for the design of fish farm facilities, explains SINTEF scientist Østen Jensen, author of the report.

Simultaneously, the Fishery and Aquaculture Industry Research Fund has given NOK 2 million to a project led by SINTEF in which the participants will develop new technology and solutions, based precisely on what this study tells us about the causes of escapes.

All the farms that were studied lie in Northern Norway. The eight escapes all happened in January last year during two periods of bad weather. The first of them produced strong south-westerly winds, while the other arrived with a storm which brought long-lasting strong winds from the southeast, combined with low temperatures.

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Source: Innovations report


Thursday 8th January

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