Pete Bevington

6 March, 2009

HEALTH problems facing Shetland’ salmon industry reared their head again yesterday (Thursday) as one company announced it was vacating four fish farms due to the sea lice parasite.

Four jobs are under threat at Norwegian-owned Mainstream Scotland’s operation in Aith Voe, off Shetland’s west coast, after the firm said they had emptied their sites of fish and were now looking for a buyer.

The news follows the discovery in January of two cases of the fatal disease Infectious Salmon Anaemia (ISA) on salmon farms off Shetland’s west coast, which led the government to set up a control zone in which fish movements were banned.

Mainstream managing director William Young said they had been badly hit by sea lice at Aith Voe, the same problem which has devastated other fish farms in the area.

Hundreds of thousands of fish off the west coast have been killed by sea lice during the past six months, though Mr Young said their main problem was restricted growth.

“Slow growth is the biggest impact of sea lice. The fish we had were around 3 kilos and they should have been 4.2 kilos,” he said.

“We have decided to exit the four sites we operate in Aith as we do not expect to produce efficiently even after the present sanitary problems have been managed.

“Like everything else in this world today it’s about economics and we can’t operate if we are losing money.”

Mr Young said they would spend the next few weeks looking for a buyer for the four sites.

The company has told its site manager and his three assistants that their jobs are under threat, and are in consultation with the unions about whether they can be redeployed within Mainstream Scotland or find work with the new owner of the cages, should one come forward.

Meanwhile they are focussing their attention on their other sites off Yell, on Shetland’s east coast where there are no sea lice problems at the moment.

The Scottish government has set up an independent inquiry into the Shetland ISA outbreak at farms owned by Scottish Sea Farms and Hjaltland Seafarms in January. ISA was discovered after government fishery scientists came to Shetland to investigate high levels of sea lice in the area.

Grieg Seafoods, who own Shetland’s biggest salmon producer Hjaltland Seafarms, reported to the Norwegian stock exchange this year that they had lost 2,500 tonnes of salmon, around 600,000 fish, through sea lice in the last three months of 2008, predominantly in Shetland.