Good news, people! It seems that the Maryland Department of the Environment and Norwegian salmon aquaculture company AquaCon have come up with a foolproof way to save the flagging Chesapeake Bay striped bass population. This sounds too good to be true? Well, stick with me and see if you can follow my logic.
When AquaCon tried to line up the permitting for a 25-acre indoor salmon farming mega-operation on the banks of the Marshyhope last year, the effort was beaten back by local residents and environmental groups. After all, the Marshyhope is a small, relatively enclosed waterway, and AquaCon proposed dumping millions of gallons of daily discharge into the 100’ wide river. But the Marshyhope is the last known river in Maryland where the endangered Atlantic Sturgeon is known to spawn.
All that discharge is necessary because, while the aquaculture system filters and recycles the water it uses, just before market the salmon need to be “purged” of geosmin. Geosmin is a metabolite byproduct created by algae and bacteria, which is carried by the fish and gives their meat an unusual taste. The flavor is often described as “earthy” and it’s the same stuff that makes carp taste like, well, mud.
Battling geosmin buildup is an issue for many different types of closed-system aquaculture operations. But by placing the fish into purge tanks, allowing them to flush out the geosmin, and dumping the geosmin-laced water rather than recycling it back into the system, that yummy salmon flavor can shine through.
When you consider this side effect of geosmin, it makes perfect sense for the Maryland Department of the Environment to issue AquaCon their requested permit to discharge a maximum daily average of 1.9 million gallons of Atlantic salmon purge water into the Susquehanna River in Port Deposit. Because if rockfish start tasting like carp, you can pretty much bet that nobody will want to catch and eat them anymore. Everyone will leave those rockfish alone, and they can reproduce in peace. Problem solved! Added bonus: if the yellow perch, white perch, crappie, and other fish swimming in those waters taste like mud nobody will want to eat them, either.
Oh sure, we might still have the danger of accidentally discharging closed-system water and the fecal waste it carries, created by growing 20 million tons of fish per year in a building. But, how big a mess could that really make? And no, AquaCon hasn’t yet explained how they’ll account for the stormwater runoff at such a massive facility, nor have they disclosed any way of mitigating the potential nutrient pollution in the discharge. Nor has anyone said what sort of measures would be used to protect young-of-year fry of the various species spawning in the river from getting sucked into the system’s intakes. So yes, there are some potential drawbacks. But wouldn’t everyone agree that they pale in comparison to reducing fishing pressure on striped bass to zero?
Now, some folks might say that it seems like I’m trying to put a happy face on a big, fat, you-know-what-burger. Some might even accuse me of (gasp!) sarcasm. In truth, however, I simply don’t have the scientific nor environmental knowledge to know whether the 300 jobs AquaCon says it will create are worth the environmental risk a project like this entails. But I do know one thing: we humans abused the Bay for centuries, and have at least become aware of that abuse and attempted to minimize it for decades. And I also know that the thought of 20 million tons of salmon growing alongside the Chesapeake Bay’s largest tributary scares me even more than the thought of eating a carp.
Editor’s Note: this article was written as the MDE announced there would be a meeting on this permit at the Elkton Town Hall on December 16, which was not enough notice to get into last month’s edition. As is true of many proposals like this public input is often ignored unless it’s overwhelming, however, the withdrawal of AquaCon’s permit request for the facility on the Marshyhope also shows it isn’t without effect. If you’d like to make your opinions heard on this matter feel free to visit the MDE website and/or the DNR website. Sending an email or two to the decision-makers at those agencies is always your prerogative.