A Florida fish farm destroyed 800,000 salmon. Did it break the law?
Animal-rights nonprofit Animal Outlook wants the authorities to investigate aquaculture giant Atlantic Sapphire
Atlantic Sapphire, a Norwegian company, calls itself the largest land-based aquaculture company in the world. It is building a giant salmon farm, known as the Bluehouse, on what used to be a tomato field in Homestead, FL, about 40 miles southwest of Miami.
Lately, things have not been going well.
In March, Atlantic Sapphire destroyed five hundred tons of fish, the equivalent of about 600,000 salmon (1), after a filtration system failed to keep water tanks clean. “Fish gathered at the bottom of the tanks, disrupting the flow of new water, causing increasing mortality,” the company said.
The previous July, Atlantic Salmon conducted an emergency harvest of about 200,000 fish after “disruptive construction work… including loud sounds and severe vibrations stressed the fish,” the company said. The fish were then “vacuum pumped . . . through an electrical stunner,” given an electric shock and bled to death, according to documents obtained by Animal Outlook, a nonprofit group based in Washington DC.
