Nick Joy

Passing it on

BY NICK JOY

ISN’T it wonderful when someone fully deserving finally gets the recognition they deserve? Many people do things that deserve praise, but many are never recognised for it. In an industry such as ours, with its endless bad press, few have broken the boundaries and achieved general praise.

I am, of course, speaking of Bob Kindness, who I worked with many years ago. He is a good man with a great passion who, even when salmon farming, went salmon fishing at the mouth of the Findhorn every year.

Achieving accolades in this publication is great, but I also opened a copy of a gamekeeping magazine and there he was in all his glory. Bob has always had a huge passion and drive. You would have to, to have achieved what he has. I’m just so glad that he is being recognised for his achievements.

There is also someone else who has fought very hard – I would say on our behalf, but he would say for the truth to be recognised. Dr Martin Jaffa is not a man who fits into any category I know. Who else would be willing to take so much flak on behalf of an industry that doesn’t really recognise him?

Yet on he fights to get people to see what I have always believed: the decline in wild salmonids has nothing to do with salmon farming. Or if there is an effect, it is very, very small. He has produced a peer-reviewed paper to show that the decline is not connected (see Fish Farmer, January 2022, p6, and Dr Jaffa’s column on p26 of this issue).

Of course, it will be ignored. There are none so blind as those who will not see. However, registering this in the public domain will have an effect in time, especially if we use his work judiciously. So my congratulations to him.

Martin’s paper supports what a lot of people have been saying for a long time. Graeme Dear, when he was Managing Director of Marine Harvest, showed mirror declines in west and east coast fisheries, only to face hoots of derision from the wild salmonid lobby.

Lessons from evolution

One of the great influences on my career in this area was Johnnie Stansfeld MBE, of Joseph Johnstone and Sons, a company operating wild salmon netting as well as farming.

Johnnie worked with wild salmon all of his life and he learned from the people he worked with, old and young, in this field. Those who knew Johnnie will remember a rather deaf, academic-looking man with bottle-bottom-thick glasses. Yet his appearance seriously belied his true character.

In his youth, I was told, he blew up obstacles in the North Esk, went out late at night and removed key stones from weirs causing them to collapse. He tickled trout and salmon and knew exactly where the fish lay in any pool on the North and South Esks. By the way, all of the above allegedly happened a long time ago.

His view on sea lice was that it would be a highly unsuccessful evolutionary strategy for any species to hang about where the predation risk is highest. For salmon that area for smolt and returning fish is the estuary and thus their strategy, as a very long surviving species, must be to avoid these areas.

It makes sense, he believed, that if sea lice were so critical then, every year there was a drought, all of the salmon would die before they entered the rivers. I myself have seen netted wild salmon from the North Esk estuary with hundreds of gravid lice on their backs, so bad that the blood was running from the wounds. On the decline in spring run salmon, he suggested that this was evolutionary. From his own experience he noted that the runs had changed their timing and their proportions since he was young. He deduced that this stopped the predators from being able to programme their own behaviour and cycles to match. He believed that spring runs will come back, but that the cycle is a long one.

Darwinian evolution suggests that species develop characteristics that gives the animal concerned an advantage – for example, the ability to thrive in both fresh and salt water.

So a salmon became anadromous in one river: but how did it move to another river? It could only be by mistake as otherwise the species would only occur in one river. This rather challenges the doctrine that every salmon goes back unerringly to its natal river. If they don’t, then over time runs will return as long as there is plenty of salmon about to make a few mistakes.

I could go on with challenges to the perceived logic about wild and farmed salmonids, but I will desist. I will leave you with the thought that I have known many people in my life and have been lucky enough for them to tell me their stories. I believe I should always pass on the good sense passed on to me, and so I shall continue. FF

“There are none so blind as those who will not see”