Norwegian Company Just Put a Bounty on 27,000 Escaped Salmon

The world’s largest producer of farmed salmon, Norwegian company Mowi, is offering a reward of 500 kroner (around $44 US) for each escaped salmon caught after around 27,000 fish busted out of a farm off Norway’s coast.

On a dark and stormy night at Mowi’s Storvika farming facility in the county of Troms, the weather became so intense that the outer ring of one of its pens tore apart, releasing around a quarter of the farm’s 105,000 salmon into the wild.

Norwegian authorities are taking the escape of these farmed salmon extremely seriously. Under normal circumstances, an operation to recapture the fish would only occur within a 500-meter zone around the facility. But since this salmon jailbreak is so much worse than anything Norwegian authorities have previously had to deal with, they’re expanding recapturing efforts well beyond the usual 500 meters, though no exact number was provided.

There is genuine cause for at least a little bit of panic here, and it’s not because the farm-raised salmon are genetically engineered hyper-killers, though the reason does have something to do with genetics. Escaped farmed salmon can reduce genetic diversity in wild salmon stocks while also introducing even more competition to wild spawning grounds.

A lot of the genetically diverse wild salmon males could potentially lose out on the chance to mate with genetically diverse wild salmon females thanks to a genetically dull ex-con salmon. The interbreeding between wild salmon and farmed salmon can lead to offspring with a lower chance of survival in the wild because they’re just not built for it. They’re built to float in the safe confines of a farm.

Calling the sudden addition of 27,000 farmed salmon into the wild a “disaster” might sound like an exaggeration, but it’s not incorrect. The escape could potentially have major ramifications for the global farmed salmon supply.

Just last week, Norway’s environment minister ruled out banning fish farming, even though the practice poses an “existential threat” to wild salmon. A little over a week after he made that statement, 27,000 farmed salmon burst out into the wild.