Wild Atlantic Salmon

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, the statistics given by my noble friend Lord Douglas-Miller are horrifying. We are now at the point where every fish needs protection. There are a number of issues here and I want to focus on just one, which is by-catch.

Regrettably, this iconic fish is currently not listed on the ICES working group on by-catch of protected species road map. We know that some salmon are caught in commercial fisheries and that there is risk of potential significant damage, but because of the lack of by-catch monitoring for salmon, it is difficult to quantify the actual damage being done and how significant it is. However, it is known that most by-catch comes from pelagic and gill-net fisheries. Sadly, to date there been no attempt to quantify the by-catch of wild salmon by these fisheries.

This Government, working with the devolved Administrations, must push as a matter of urgency the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization, ICES and the regional fisheries management organisations, first, to access fishing effort data from pelagic fisheries and gill nets provided at fine temporal and spatial scales; secondly, to increase monitoring at sea and onshore, with specific requirements for minimum data collection; and, thirdly, to recognise the importance of different species. These can be difficult to identify, especially when a specimen may be a small, immature salmon crushed in among hundreds of tonnes of a target species. To address this, environmental DNA data collection should be mandatory to improve the detection of salmon in by-catch and expand our understanding of their migratory pathways.