Icelandic salmon ranching; problems and policy issues - A historical perspective

No abstracts are to be cited without prior reference to the author.

Ranching of Atlantic salmon in Iceland started with the establishment of Kollafjörður Experimental Fish Farm in 1961 (Guðjónsson 1973). The first smolts were released in 1964 with considerable returns of salmon in 1965. The primary purpose of the fish farm was to strengthen aquaculture and enhancement efforts in Iceland by developing good quality salmon smolts (Ísaksson 1976). The release experiments and subsequent returns of salmon to the fish farm led to a pilot ranching operation, which provided considerable income to the farm. Several smaller release operations started in the 1960s such as the Lárós ranching station in the Breiðafjörður area and Súgandafjörður release site on the northwest peninsula ( Ísaksson and Óskarsson 1986). The introduction of coded wire tags (CWT) to Iceland in the 1970s (Ísaksson and Bergman 1978) was a major technological breakthrough in the methodology used to evaluate sea survival and return-rates to ranching facilities. These tags have since that time been exclusively used to evaluate return-rates of wild and ranched smolt and provided valuable information on straying between ranching facilities and into salmon rivers (Ísaksson et.al. 1997). Important information on the feeding and behaviour of ranched salmon has also been aquired through the recapture of tagged and untagged postsmolts in coastal waters (Sturlaugsson 2000) and through the use of Data Storage Tags (Sturlaugsson et. al. 1997). The main impetus for conducting salmon ranching in Iceland is the fact that no salmon fishery is allowed within Iceland´s territorial limits and salmon are thus only harvested in terminal fisheries, mostly by angling. Exempted were a few sites with heritable netting rights, which now have been closed down.