Should you be near the Kornstadfjord on Nordmøre, then throw out the line: Lots of farmed halibut are astray.
Less than 20 minutes ago
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On Monday 4 July, Nordic Halibut AS discovered a large crack in one of the nets at the facility in Ørjavik in Hustadvika municipality.
14,000 halibut were in the net. Since then, a farming company and a local fisherman have caught close to a thousand of them.
– Anyone is allowed to fish there, as long as they keep 200 meters away from the facility, says CEO of Nordic Halibut Edvard Henden to VG.
IntraFish mentioned the incident first.
–Henden says that they do not know how the relatively large hole in the net came about. The main theory is that a vessel has cut up the net, perhaps one of their own.
– We have good fish left in the net, so we do not think that so many escaped. We had a hope that no more thousands are going astray, says the Nordic Halibut boss.
The fish has been in the sea for three years and achieved a weight of six kilos on average. Those left in the net will be slaughtered in August. Then it becomes clear how many ran away.
– The halibut is quite local, so hopefully we can fish most of them up again, says Henden, who confirms that they have caught about a hundred a day.
–For Nordic Halibut’s reputation, the escape is unfortunate.
– We have used a lot of resources to avoid escape. The whole concept is to have them in captivity, we do not want spread. It’s about biosafety, says Henden.
Section manager in the Directorate of Fisheries Ruth L. Kjæmpenes tells Intrafish that the risk of genetic influence is far less than when salmon escape.
She explains that halibut do not go up rivers, like salmon. In addition, the possibility of recapture is good, because the halibut does not travel that far or move fast.
– The halibut that is bred on now, does not have many generations from being wild halibut, which also reduces the risk of negative impact on the genetics of wild halibut, says section manager Kjæmpenes to Intrafish.
The map shows where the halibut escaped:
Wild halibut live by eating other fish and life on the seabed.
The largest documented halibut caught in Norwegian waters weighed 314.5 kilos and was caught in nets off Sørøya in western Finnmark in October 2007, according to Wikipedia.
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