Norwegian trawlers are destroying salmon population’s

One third of all salmon that leave the British islands are killed by the Norwegian and Russian mackerel trawlers. This has been claimed by Scottish and Norwegian researchers. They have discovered that most of the young fish that travel North towards West Greenland end up in the trawler nets.

Spokes person for the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (Nasco) has claimed that the total could be as high as 900,000 smolt that are killed each year. To counter this spokes men for International Convention for the Exploration of the Seas estimate that 3.6 million salmon travel north from Europe’s rivers each season.

George Baxter from World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) has pointed out that the removal of almost one third of the total population of smolt is madness. He went on to say that this is a typical example of unmanaged fleet fishing which has to stop. An interesting fact is that salmon numbers have dropped by 67% of the last thirty years