Four Fish (6 page)

Though the work of Lush continued in terrestrial animals, there was one major limiting factor that slowed the rate of improvement of a population over time: cattle and sheep produce only a few offspring in the course of their lives. The progress of discovering which parents create the most productive animals was limited by the small sample size of each new generation. Many crosses of many families were dead ends further limiting progress. Much backtracking had to be done. Improvement, relatively speaking, was gradual.

But in 1963 a meeting between Jay Laurence Lush and a young Norwegian animal breeder named Trygve Gjedrem suddenly opened up an entirely new avenue. For the Yupik nation and anyone else in the world who had anything to do with wild salmon, that meeting would change everything.

 

 

 

T
rygve Gjedrem is semiretired now, but you can still find him animatedly moving around the offices of a Norwegian research institution called Akvaforsk. Akvaforsk’s offices are located in the town of Ås, nearly as far north as Kwik’pak Fisheries but on the opposite end of the human/salmon relationship.

To get to Akvaforsk, you must first pass through the IKEASHOWROOM-LOOKING Oslo Airport and then travel south for half an hour on a local train, yellow and clean and as steady on the rails as a zipper. Unlike most other European or American cities, Oslo gives up quickly to the countryside, and within a few minutes the whitest of snows blankets the pleasantly rolling hills, dairy farms, and cozy-looking wooded hamlets. Crisp, well-defined cross-country-ski tracks run alongside the train, and Norwegians, who seem more comfortable on skis than they do on foot, whisk by in precise, healthy strokes, sometimes keeping pace with the train as they glide downhill.

Perhaps it was the snowy northern climate where I met Gjedrem, but sitting there in a little leather cap with blue twinkly eyes, he looked to me like one of Santa’s more senior elves. When it comes to salmon, it turns out, he is much more like Santa himself.

If he had proceeded along with life as he originally intended, Trygve Gjedrem would have had nothing to do with salmon. He was trained as a sheep breeder, and sheep were what he knew best. During his youth Gjedrem and most of the rest of the European agricultural community were captivated by the success that Americans were achieving in improving animals for human consumption. This was part of a larger trend in the agriculture of the 1960s that came to be known as the “Green Revolution”—a series of scientific leaps in crop and animal development that caused agriculture to become substantially more productive. The Green Revolution is largely credited with having successfully staved off famine in India, China, and elsewhere in the developing world just as populations were booming. And in 1963, when Gjedrem went to the States as part of a foreign-exchange program, he was thrilled to meet one of the principal architects of the animal side of the Green Revolution, the animal-breeding theorist Jay Laurence Lush. “Lush was a fantastic man,” Gjedrem told me as the snow sparkled outside his window, “a great man. But he was a quiet person. He did not use hard words.”

Unbeknownst to Lush, there was an experiment going on in Norway at the time of Gjedrem’s U.S. sojourn that would greatly amplify the influence of his theories. Beginning in the early 1960s, around the same time as wild Atlantic salmon were being fished into oblivion off the coast of Greenland, two brothers in the Norwegian town of Hitra named Sivert and Ove Grøntvedt began collecting salmon juveniles and raising them in nets suspended in the clear waters of the local fjord. Of all fish, salmon proved particularly adaptable to this process. Generally speaking, most of the fish we like to eat hatch out of microscopic eggs and require microscopic food to get through the first phases of life—something very hard to replicate in an artificial environment. Salmon, however, hatch out of large, nutrient-rich eggs and live off an oily yolk sac for the first weeks of their lives. They are quickly able to transition to eating chopped-up pieces of fish. Something the Hitra brothers were able to obtain easily from the dense herring population in the fjords of coastal Norway.

The Hitra trials overcame an essential problem that happens with salmon in nature. With most salmon a substantial number of young die in the early phases of life. This mortality may be more than 99 percent in natural systems. But by keeping the fish protected from predators in net cages and giving them a regular food supply of herring and other small fish, the first salmon aquaculturists reversed nature’s equation. Suddenly many more animals were surviving, and with wild salmon already in steep decline those fish could be sold at a considerable profit. “They really earned money!” Gjedrem told me, slamming the table with his open hand on each downbeat. “And they told their brothers and sisters around the coast, ‘WE MADE MONEY!’”

Seeing the success of the Grøntvedt brothers, Gjedrem and his thesis adviser, Harald Skjervold, realized that the breeding logic of Jay Laurence Lush, if applied to salmon, had huge potential. Up until the meeting with Lush, the initial profits being made in the nascent Norwegian salmon-farming industry were being gleaned from fish that were essentially wild in their genetic makeup. No one had done the hard work with salmon breeding that Lush and his four thousand years of predecessors had done with cattle and sheep. “I am a breeder,” Gjedrem told me, “and we thought it was important to get started by first selecting a breed of fish. If there was going to be real success, we realized we could not have efficient production based on wild animals.”

Moreover, the Norwegian breeders had one thing that modern cattle breeders didn’t have: a vast genetic reservoir of wild animals from which to draw the most favorable genes. Since wild cattle were domesticated many millennia ago, without any coherent genetically based selection methodology, many useful genes may have been lost and never made it into the animals we eat today. But at the time Norwegian salmon breeding began, wild salmon were still viable and diverse. The genetic potential was enormous.

The initial selection of farmed Atlantic salmon took place from fish drawn from forty different river systems. Every salmon river has its own unique set of challenges to which fish must adapt. Some rivers are very long, like the Yukon, and require animals that can build up tremendous fat reserves in order to survive the extended journey. Others are very far north, with only a short season of warmer temperatures, and require a fish that can maximize growth, particularly during its juvenile phase. But whatever the manifestation of difference that occurred in different strains of salmon, the first salmon breeders realized that crossing and recrossing the specific families from the original forty rivers would result in salmon that grew faster. And because salmon, unlike cattle and sheep, can produce
many thousands
of offspring in the course of their lives, once favorable individuals were found, just a few matriarchs and patriarchs could form the basis of a whole new race of highly productive fish. A domestic population could be created quickly that would be quite different from the initial wild forebears.

For Gjedrem and the other breeders of Akvaforsk, it was as if they had discovered a new continent of possibility. “The goal with growth rate is to get upstairs,” Gjedrem told me, sketching a rudimentary staircase on a piece of paper in front of him, “This footstep—that’s the generation interval. And the game is to step up. Because of Lush’s theories, we were sure that we could walk up the stairway with salmon. The first results showed us that there were dramatic differences between the best growing families and the worst. . . . And what is so impressive is that each generation, each step up, we made progress of thirteen- to fourteen-percent improvement in growth rate.”

In other words, within just seven generations—fourteen years—the Norwegians were able to double the growth rate of salmon—something that had taken thirty generations and sixty years of applied breeding, not to mention an unknowable amount of Neolithic-era undocumented selection, with cattle and sheep. The end result was the breeding of a fish that while still technically the same species as its forebears was markedly different in its internal metabolism. Some scientists refer to this separate line of salmon as
Salmo domesticus.
By the standard of sheer numbers,
Salmo domesticus
is now the most successful salmon in the world. For it was
domesticus
that the Norwegians were to use when they turned salmon farming from a domestic endeavor to an international juggernaut.

The emergence of
Salmo domesticus
helped Norwegians increase production of farmed salmon to a world-dominating half million tons in just thirty years. Once the Norwegian fjords were full of salmon cages, the farming methodology and the genetic stock of
domesticus
were exported by Norwegian salmon companies to other cold-water, fjord-rich territories like southern Chile, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia. Indeed, the most striking thing about Chile’s largest fish market in the Patagonian town of Puerto Montt isn’t the exotic kingklip and the fist-size barnacles on display. It is the five-foot-high piles of bright orange salmon fillets shining slick and fresh in the austral sun.

Before the Norwegians came along, there were no salmon living in the world south of the equator—the equator acts as a thermal barrier that the cold-water-requiring wild salmon could not cross in nature. Today there are hundreds of millions of salmon in Chile, which is now the second-largest salmon-producing nation in the world. A further result of Gjedrem’s efforts is the outright domination of farmed salmon over wild salmon. Every year more than 3
billion
pounds of farmed salmon are produced, around three times the amount of wild fish harvested. Many of those many millions of farmed salmon, whether living in Norway, Chile, or Canada, can trace their heritage back to the breeding lines created at Akvaforsk in 1971.

To people who trade in wild salmon, like Jac Gadwill of Kwik’pak Fisheries, this seems like the worst kind of bastardization. “A cage is a cage is a cage,” Jac told me when I asked his opinion of farmed salmon. “The life of a wild animal is completely different to the life of an animal in a feedlot. What happens to a fish if you don’t let it swim? I suppose you could take a Fijian boy and raise him in Guyana and maybe he’d still wind up a fat boy, but I don’t know.”

But Trygve Gjedrem sees nothing wrong with a dominant strain of domesticated fish emerging in the world. Indeed, there is something in artificial selection that needs to be kept in mind when thinking about the health of the ocean in larger terms. Farmed salmon are the most consumed farmed finfish in the Western world. The salmon-farming industry requires an enormous amount of food. And with salmon a lot of that food consists of other fish that are harvested from the wild. In an unimproved state, farmed salmon require as much as six pounds of wild fish, ground up and turned into pellet feed to produce one pound of edible flesh. Selectively bred salmon, meanwhile, have reached a point where less than three pounds of wild fish can produce a pound of salmon. And as salmon continue to be bred into a more and more efficient consumer of marine protein, that ratio is likely to drop.

But there is also a risk. The tamed-salmon genome is now markedly different from the wild-salmon genome. When tamed salmon escape into the wild (as they do in the millions every year) they risk displacing a self-sustaining wild fish population with a domesticated race that is not capable of surviving without human support.
Salmo domesticus
has been bred to eat a lot and grow fast in a controlled environment, but it has lost many of the fierce, determined traits that make a wild salmon able to swim against powerful currents, withstand fluctuations in temperature, and spawn in a river besieged by predators. Critics argue that escaped farmed salmon may outcompete wild salmon in some phases in their life cycle only to be unable to reproduce later on down the line. Some maintain that this could have a fatal impact on the long-term viability of wild salmon everywhere.

In spite of these risks, Gjedrem believes that improvement should be the norm for all farmed fish. “With the exception of Atlantic salmon, we are so far behind terrestrial food production,” he told me, driving me in his little blue car back to the little yellow train across the snowy white Norwegian dales. “Think of the Green Revolution of the 1960s! Since the Green Revolution, there has been no major starvation in India or China. The same thing should have started by now with fish and shellfish.”

Of all the people I’ve met in the world of seafood, Gjedrem seemed the most baffled by the way salmon farming has been increasingly targeted by nonprofits as a polluting, environmentally degrading industry. Gjedrem is a child of the Depression, and the formative experiences of his childhood were poverty and human starvation. Any move away from that baseline is progress. His blue eyes twinkled, and he seemed to bristle with excitement when he talked about all the people the ocean could feed if breeding principles were put into place in a rational manner. “It’s such a waste of resources,” he declared of the world’s failure to embrace selective breeding of fish. It was not in fury or anger that he said this, but with a kind of bewilderment. Why even allow for the possibility of starvation?

As we reached the train station and said our good-byes, I remembered one last thing I’d meant to get his opinion on. I told him how I’d heard that farmed salmon descending from the original Norwegian breeding lines had escaped from their net pens in Canada, and there was evidence that they were establishing themselves in west coast rivers. At this, Gjedrem smiled and smacked the steering wheel of his little blue car.

“Hah!” he said. “I was wondering when that was going to happen.”

There was neither concern nor criticism in his voice. Just the quiet observation of someone of an earlier generation. Someone who saw the interplay of wildness and domestication as an ongoing drama where mankind was the central character and human starvation the archest of enemies.