Author: Noel Carr

Irish Country Sports & Country Life magazine is out and flying off the shelves now. Our news report is on page. 106. Read and enjoy.

http://www.countrysportsandcountrylife.com/

Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s address last night to the nation did not mention
anything about Minister Coveney’s ten mega salmon farming plan. It would
have been a great Christmas present to Ireland and voters of the Mayo Moy
and Ireland if he said that he had read all our objections and IFI vs.
Marine Institute condtradictory advice and decided to withdraw all
unsutainable salmon farm applications and instead develop agri food and angling tourism jobs – a policy that is and will hopefully be the backbone of our job creation plan for many years to come. Still hopeful, sense will prevail for 2014.

Wow. By co incidence I’ve just seen a report on tg4 nuacht that they have put 2,000 ballon wrasse into cages in conamara. They tried the same thing a few years ago in Donegal and they all died before the farmed salmon because a fish can only eat so many sealice. Good way to get another grant though. It’s all a load of ballon really.

More than 9,000 wrasse cleaner fish, valued at some ?????20,000 have been culled at a Shetland hatchery because of an outbreak marine Viral Haemorrhagic Septicaemia. The wrasse, which eat sea lice, were to be placed in salmon farm cages to ??????clean’ lice from the bodies infested salmon; sea lice have been devastating captive farmed salmon in recent months causing huge numbers of farm fish to die.

Scottish Government fish health inspectors are currently investigating the outbreak and there are indications that the problem is affecting wrasse in other parts of Scotland. Scottish Salmon Company, in collaboration with the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation has been developing a wrasse breeding programme for the last two years and recently released wrasse into fish farm cages in the Western Isles.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds of industry and tax-payers money has been invested in the programme to help fish farmers fight the sea lice scourge.

Fly Fishing and Fly Tying magazine has argued for a number of years that insufficient scientific studies had been carried into the implications of breeding wrasse on such a vast scale, predicting that disease problems would always be possible when so many fish were crowded together. As reported in the last issue of FF&FT work has now commenced in Shetland to introduce lumpsuckers fish into fish farm cages in the hope that they might fare better that wrasse.

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