Excellent work my friend, your working with some of my favourite fish, lol.Sure. Suzuki and his organization have consistantly smeared Aquaculture. Now in some cases he is right, but when he paints the industry as a whole with the same brush, he ignores the positives and never mentions them. There are farms out west which use a system that is the equivalent of placing a tank in the water. Effluent is controlled, pathogens are killed with UV light, or ozonation. Escapes are as close to 0% as possible. Granted these systems are expensive, so aren't used on a widescale basis, but the public never hears of these systems.
They consistently slam the industry for antibiotic use in the diets, ignoring other industries using much more antibiotics and forget about mentioning the use of beneficial probiotics(like those found in our yogurt). In fact Canadian aquaculture producers are less competitive than the industry in other countries because of our strict requirements for antibiotic use.
Everyone has heard of the imminent collapse of world fisheries unless commercial fishing is stopped, this includes the salmon fleet in the Pacific. Aquaculture provides the means to enhance stocks, but few people know of the Biodiversity facilities DFO runs, with world class genetic breeding programs, maintaining those pedigrees from the various rivers. This is something you would expect Mr. Suzuki to have an opinion on, as it is the field he holds degrees in.
His organization loves to scare us with horror stories of genetic contamination when wild pacific breed with farmed atlantic salmon. Huge difference in the spawning preparation among the atlantic salmon and the various pacific salmons. Pacific salmon migrate hundreds and in some case a thoudsand kilometers up very steep rivers. Anyone seen a river on the Atlantic coast? Rivers are short and the inclination is very small comparatively.
Aquaculture is also beginning to use alternatives, to accomodate the growing industry and the relatively stable or shrinking bait fish catches. The omeg-3 fatty acid is bought by many different industries including pharmaceuticals. The fish meal used as the protein content in the diets is also a limited quantity. We are studying at my school right now the growth of salmonids when fed on heat treated vegetable proteins and oil seeds. After 6 weeks the growth is on par with our control diet, very promissing and we hope to publish a paper with this study.
These and many more are things the Suzuki Foundation will never tell you. As I said there are bad apples out there like any other industry, but it's not fair to skip over the good work being done by many diligent people in the industry.
This is my problem with people like Suzuki and to some extent Bit. They fail to see the forest for the trees. The hysterics they use to further an agenda, do nothing, but hilite the errors.
After reading and hearing DS outburst and hysterical theatric at am 640 and an elementary school out west. I have very little respect for the man, he's on a political crusade in my eyes and nothing more.
The optics on this magical mystery tour bus, are just more fuel for the fire. There is no reason for his team to have chosen this mode of transportation, when there is a viable alternative.
Then we have people like Bit, that resort to name calling and demands of proof that the their is an affordable alternative. Lets face it, I bet half the manufacturers of Hybrid and Fuel Cell equipt buses, would have donated one, for purely capitalistic reasons alone.