Yet another Cooke Aquaculture industrial salmon farm has been hit with a case of the Infectious Salmon Anemia virus (ISAv) in Newfoundland.
News reports Thursday confirmed that ISAv-infected salmon have been identified in Cold Ocean (Cooke Aquaculture) feedlots in the Northwest Cove of Hermitage Bay – off the southern coast of Newfoundland.
Close to 500,000 diseased salmon may have been harvested from the Northwest Cove facility after Canadian Food Inspection authorities were contacted by Cooke.
Cooke farms in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Scotland and Chile have had several ISA outbreaks in recent years, resulting in the destruction of millions of market-ready salmon. The firm has also reported several escapes of millions of fish from its open pen net farm sites in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Washington State.
Cooke’s poor farming practices have resulted in bans from the State of Washington and in vigorous opposition to its expansion plans in Liverpool and elsewhere in Nova Scotia.
The first ever case of ISA detected at the North West Cove salmon aquaculture site in Hermitage Bay was announced by CFIA in 2018, but records maintained by CFIA show the Canadian Maritimes have dealt with as many as six cases of the disease since the beginning of the year, including four that required culling.
Cooke dealt with at least three ISA cases at its Newfoundland operations between October 2017 and March 2018, two of which involved pathogenic strains that required culling.
A map created by Undercurrent using government records of aquaculture facility licenses granted in the area where the latest outbreak happened shows a cluster of salmon farms, with one farm larger than 50 hectares, though the records do not indicate which of the farms are stocked.
Undercurrent’s map also shows the Hermitage Bay location – identified as part of Cooke’s Cold Ocean Salmon division — is roughly just 30 miles across land from Spyglass Cove, near the town of Pool’s Cove, where ISA hit a 50-acre salmon farm with 15 net pens in late March, 2018. That farm is owned by Marine Harvest.
The southern coast of Newfoundland is peppered with salmon farms, reveals a map compiled by Undercurrent News using government licensing data. The government data does not reveal which farms are currently stocked. Purple arrows point to Cold Ocean Salmon Inc.’s (Cooke Aquaculture) ISA-infected salmon farm in Hermitage Bay and Northern Harvest’s previously infected ISA farm in Spyglass Cove.
The culling at Spyglass raised questions about the Dartek Hatchery, in Nova Scotia, the source of its fish and where ISA was detected earlier. As many as 500,000 salmon were culled at Dartek in early March.
Cooke suggested in 2018 that a hatchery is not likely to blame for the spread of ISA, because those salmon “are raised in certified disease-free hatcheries, vaccinated and certified disease-free before transferring to net pens.”
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