IT SEEMS obvious: with stocks of salmon and cod plummeting, why not top up endangered populations with fish bred in captivity? “People feel that if you add some fish, it must be doing some good,” says Andy Ferguson at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Not so, according to a 10-year study by Ferguson and his colleagues that followed salmon released from captivity into the wild over three generations. The results of the investigation suggest that deliberate and accidental releases of fish from farms could send wild populations into terminal decline.
The team released more than 120,000 salmon eggs into the…
