Salmon Crisis- National Geographic

Farm-raised salmon now outnumber wild fish nearly 85 to one. As wild stocks dwindle, this legendary sport fish has become the veritable chicken of the sea.



Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

Standing on a grassy bank of the River Deveron, Lord Marnoch, an eminent Scottish judge, is attached—via a 12-foot (4-meter) fly rod, a bit of line, and a hook—to an Atlantic salmon. The creature struggling to dislodge Lord Marnoch's fly from its jaw was spawned in the Deveron, resided several years in the river, and has spent the past year fattening up in the North Atlantic, probably near the Faroe Islands or Iceland, before completing its long migration home to reproduce. It is a strong, wild, young salmon of about five pounds (two kilograms), known as a grilse, and it was doing fine until it entered the Deveron and succumbed to the allure of Lord Marnoch's delicate, orange fly.

Lord Marnoch is the very picture of the classic Atlantic salmon angler. A distinguished-looking man of 62 with a thick head of graying hair, he is dressed on this cool July day in moss green knickers, a beige cashmere sweater, and a brown tie. Over his knickers he is wearing pale green waders. He carries a wooden walking stick and wears a tweed, olive-colored deerstalker cap. He was born Michael Bruce, but upon being elevated to Scotland's High Court he was given the title of Lord Marnoch, an honor he wears with ease. He and several friends have come to the Deveron in northeastern Scotland to catch the king of game fish, a highly civilized pursuit that involves much angling but also pleasant hours eating pâté sandwiches and drinking single-malt whisky in a green hut by the Deveron. It is a picturesque river, about 25 yards (23 meters) wide in this stretch, and flows placidly through a hilly landscape that is a checkerboard of green wheat fields, slopes of golden barley, and tidy forests of larch, beech, and alder.

The fish is holding firm in the depths of a tea-colored pool, its resistance causing Lord Marnoch's rod to bend and his line to shudder. Shadowing the judge is his gillie, or fishing guide, Harvey Grant, a man who comes to the river dressed in a windowpane tweed suit and who, in his Scottish brogue, gently dispenses words of advice: "Walk it upstream, sir, just like you're walking a dog."

Soon, Lord Marnoch has reeled the silver creature into the bank, where Grant nets it.

"Not a bad wee grilse," says Lord Marnoch.

"Kill it, sir?" asks Grant.

"Absolutely," replies Lord Marnoch, whereupon the gillie grabs a rock and ends the salmon's migration with a firm tap to the head.

"I really think these beautiful creatures are far too fine to be played with and put back," says Lord Marnoch, a salmon conservationist who nonetheless believes in killing a few for the pot. "Catch-and-release fishing is rather like in the Roman arena going thumbs up or down. If a beautiful creature has succumbed to me, I think the right thing is to hit it on the head."

The scene is a timeless one, and the grilse caught by Lord Marnoch fits the image of an Atlantic salmon: Salmo salar, the "leaper" in Latin, a sleek, chrome-colored fish that fights its way up northern rivers, jumping rapids and waterfalls on its spawning run. The truth is, however, that wild Atlantic salmon have been in steep decline for decades, and today the North Atlantic is dominated by a new kind of salmon. It can be found not far from Lord Marnoch's fishing hole on the Deveron, packed into sea cages in the lochs of western Scotland. There, about 50 million farmed Atlantic salmon swim round and round in pens as they are fed pellets to speed their growth, pigments to mimic the pink hue of wild salmon flesh, and pesticides to kill the lice that go hand-in-hand with an industrial feedlot. It is these salmon that you purchase at the market for five dollars a pound, and today in Scotland—as in many North Atlantic countries—farmed salmon outnumber wild salmon by 300 or 400 to one.