Dead salmon create election stink on Australian island

HOBART - On a tree-lined beach in Australia’s rugged island state of Tasmania, locals discovered popcorn-sized bits of dead salmon washed up along the sand.

When the stinky remains landed in Verona Sands, population 131, they stirred up a festering environment-versus-industry row shortly before the general elections on May 3.

The fish remnants found in February were traced to a mass die-off from vast, circular salmon farming pens set up in the waters of the surrounding Tasman Sea estuary.

The Tasmanian fish farming industry produces 75,000 tonnes of Atlantic salmon a year – 90 per cent of Australia’s total output.

But in the warm, summer temperatures, a bacterium had taken hold in some of the salmon pens.

“What I saw was little chunks, the size of small plums, and they were scattered the entire length of the beach,” said Ms Jess Coughlin, a campaigner with community group Neighbours of Fish Farming.

When she sought advice to identify the mystery morsels, a diver who had worked in fish farms told her the industry referred to them as popcorn.

“It’s a common occurrence when the fish are left dead in the pens for a number of days and they start to rot and break down,” Ms Coughlin told AFP.

Rotting salmon

At first, the dead salmon sink.

“The flesh and fat pull away from the body and, because of the pressure of the water and the wave action, as it makes its way up to the surface it clumps into these balls.”

Dead salmon falling apart within pens where fish are still being grown for human consumption is “incredibly disturbing”, she said.

Tasmania’s environmental regulator described the die-off in salmon pens in the area – the D’Entrecasteaux Channel – as an “unprecedented salmon mortality event”.

The state’s chief veterinary officer Kevin de