Many people don't know the difference between wild salmon and farm raised salmon. For example, when you go to the grocery store and see fresh wild salmon fillets it is usually not from the Pacific Ocean. The fillets came from the Atlantic Ocean where they have farms, that raise salmon that were wild at one point in time and were given special formulated feed in a fish farm. True wild salmon thrive out in the Pacific Ocean. They are born in a stream, swim out to the ocean, grow in the ocean, swim back to where they were hatched from, mate, lay eggs, and will shortly end up dying afterwords.
Atlantic Salmon are placed in a hatchery, grow, and feed in a restricted area, majority of the time they are turned into commercial food products and are exported across the world to other countries or in grocery stores. This Atlantic Ocean process of salmon hatchery is called aquaculture and is done in other countries and places like, The Great Lakes. In the United States the salmon farms make approximately is higher than 80 percent of the salmon that are on the market each day. Thirty percent comes from the traditional hatcheries and the other fifty percent are raised in aquaculture or open pen nets off shore. These farms can raise up to one million salmon a time. The farmed salmon are confined, fed a steady diet of special formulated protein food pellets, and when they eat it, they become fatter than wild salmon, with not much more omega-3 than expected, but actually less per every three ounces.
Farm raised salmon don't have as healthy amount of fatty acids as wild salmon does. Carcinogenic chemicals are found in farmed raised salmon and are purchased from U.S. Grocery stores have so much higher levels of PCB that pose an increased risk for cancer. The United States has banned PCB to be used in all items, but they persist in the environment and end up in animal fat. When the farmed salmon from U.S. Grocery stores were tested, their salmon that was farmed contained up to twice the fat of wild salmon. The test also found sixteen times the PCB compared to those found wild salmon, four times the levels in beef, and 3.4 times the levels found in other types of seafood.
Other studies have shown in Canada, Ireland, and Britain have found their results the same or similar. Diseases and parasites, which normally exist in extremely low levels in fish scattered around the oceans, could run rampant in a densely packed oceanic feedlots. There chances for survival, farmed fish are vaccinated, while as small fry, and later are given antibiotics or pesticides to avoid the infections. Sea lice, is another particular problem, in a study a fisherman brought two baby pink salmon covered with them. A bioligist later went around salmon farms examining more than seven hundred baby pink salmon and found out that seventy-eight percent were covered with a fatal load of sea lice while, juvenile salmon that she netted farther from the farms were largely lice-free.
Sea lice, in particular, are a problem. In a recent L.A. Times story, Alexandra Morton, an independent biologist and critic of salmon farms, is quoted as beginning to see sea lice in 2001 when a fisherman brought her two baby pink salmon covered with them. Examining more than 700 baby pink salmon around farms, she found that 78 percent were covered with a fatal load of sea lice while juvenile salmon she netted farther from the farms were largely lice-free. Well, there you have it unless you want cancer, want to eat a sick fish, or would you rather have healthy wild salmon that is not farm raised and is a cancer fighter, there is no contest eat wild salmon.
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