A Norwegian salmon farm has received the scorn of local conservationists quick to label the mass escape of some 27,000 fish as a “disaster for wild salmon” as its owner, Mowi – a global seafood company – has offered fishers a bounty of £36 for every one of the escapees they catch.

The escape is the result of a cage failure at Mowi’s Storvika V facility in Troms, in the north-west of Norway. According to reports, it was one of the fish cage’s moorings that broke, causing part of the fish pen to sink and thus releasing some 27,000 farmed salmon into the waters surrounding it.

That number is believed to be around one quarter of the some 105,000 salmon currently farmed on the site.

The escape occurred on Friday, February 9th. On Monday, Mowi issues a press statement in which it admitted the event was something “that should not have happened” adding it was a “very regrettable” situation.

Noting the immense pressures that wild salmon are already facing in waters around Norway, conservationists have been quick to chastise the salmon farm, calling the event a “disaster for wild salmon.” The escape does indeed raise some serious environmental concerns. Research has shown that among the risks farmed salmon pose to their wild counterparts is that interbreeding can – and often does occur – in this circumstances, altering the genetic make-up of wild salmon populations and introducing new diseases such as infections from sea lice that could wipe out wild populations.

Mowi has now emptied the affected cage and is working with local partners and authorities to contain the impact after Norwegian authorities ordered them to expand their efforts.

In an unprecedented move, they have also turned to local fishers for assistance, offering a reward of 500 kroner – or £36 – for each one of the escaped salmon caught. Once caught, the fish can be delivered to fish ‘reception centres’ where a bounty can be collected.

Vegard Oen Hatten, a spokesperson for the fisheries directorate, said: “Normally, fish farmers are only allowed to conduct recapture operations within a 500-metre zone around the facility in the event of an escape. However, based on the potential scale of this incident, Mowi was instructed to extend recapture efforts beyond this zone.”

In Norway, a country that exports around 1.2m tonnes of farmed salmon every year, wild salmon numbers dropped to a historic low last summer so that 33 rivers had to be closed to salmon fishing. This summer, authorities have suggested that 42 rivers and three fjords should be closed to protect wild salmon populations.

Pål Mugaas, a spokesperson for Norske Lakseelver (Norwegian Salmon Rivers), told The Guardian: “27,000 farmed salmon on the run is a disaster for wild salmon.”

“Science has proved that interbreeding between wild stocks and farmed salmon produce offspring that in the long term has low survival rate in nature,” he added.

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