Multispecies hierarchies and capitalist value: Insights from salmon aquaculture

Research in animal geographies is increasingly paying attention to hierarchies and inequalities within and between nonhuman animals. The way that animals are valued differently and hierarchically within this growing body of scholarship has tended to focus on a range of biopolitical differences between and within species. Collard and Dempsey’s recent contribution, in contrast, points to the importance of hierarchy and difference in the valuation of nonhuman animals under capitalism. Their framework identifies five orientations of human and nonhuman bodies in relation to capitalist value, which in turn provides a heuristic to explore how capitalist accumulation produces and depends on differentially oriented natures. Our contribution to these debates – and to the Collard and Dempsey framework – draws on our ongoing research in Eastern Canada where salmon aquaculture is a growing yet highly contested industry. We focus on two instances of multispecies hierarchy and difference in and around the salmon cage that are central to this form of ocean-based production. In focusing on multispecies relations, we build on Collard and Dempsey's framework in two main ways. First, we show how valuation and devaluation reflect competing but relational capitalist interests, which rely on and produce different natures refracted through the logic of the nature/culture divide: Atlantic salmon are valued as game fish, and as the key species for Canada's aquaculture sector. Second, we show how capital's valuation of one species, in our case farmed salmon, implicates the valuation of others, namely sea lice and lumpfish. Our case studies extend Collard and Dempsey's framework by demonstrating how capitalist differentiation produces violence through and outside of commodification in terms of multispecies difference and hierarchy; the lives and futures of wild and farmed salmon, lumpfish and sea lice are entangled, and reflect relational and changing orientations to capitalist value over time.

Insect feeds in salmon aquaculture: sociotechnical imagination and responsible story-telling

Salmon aquaculture is a growing industry with increasing challenges of feed sustainability and availability. This global sustainability issue has led to calls for novel feeds. Aquafly, a Norwegian research project, has performed small-scale tests using the black soldier fly as an ingredient in salmon diet. However, in order for insect feeds to become a reality on the industrial scale, workable scientific, technical and political solutions have to be envisioned in tandem. In this study, we studied, elicited and assessed sociotechnical imaginaries in the Aquafly research consortium, using the approaches of concomitant ELSA research, the Ethical Matrix and Quantitative Story-Telling. We show how the sociotechnical imaginaries develop together with the scientific trajectory of the project, and how this also affects the assessment of the ethical and environmental impacts of the technology, including issues of food and feed safety and security, fish health and welfare, pollution and efficient use of waste streams. We show how there are intrinsic challenges when dealing with global sustainability issues in the research project. For instance, overcoming the problem of salmon feed scarcity may aggravate the challenges caused by intensive aquaculture. We report the results of a Quantitative Story-Telling exercise that indicates that Aquafly can be seen as part of a larger economy of technological promise, and discuss if and how this critique can be employed and integrated into scientific and technical imagination in a research project, contributing to Responsible Research and Innovation.

Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) Cage-Site Distribution, Behavior, and Physiology During a Newfoundland Heat Wave

Background: Climate change is leading to increased water temperatures and reduced oxygen levels at sea-cage sites, and this is a challenge that the Atlantic salmon aquaculture industry must adapt to it if it needs to grow sustainably. However, to do this, the industry must better understand how sea-cage conditions influence the physiology and behavior of the fish.Method: We fitted ~2.5 kg Atlantic salmon on the south coast of Newfoundland with Star-Oddi milli-HRT ACT and Milli-TD data loggers (data storage tags, DSTs) in the summer of 2019 that allowed us to simultaneously record the fish's 3D acceleration (i.e., activity/behavior), electrocardiograms (and thus, heart rate and heart rate variability), depth, and temperature from early July to mid-October.Results: Over the course of the summer/fall, surface water temperatures went from ~10–12 to 18–19.5°C, and then fell to 8°C. The data provide valuable information on how cage-site conditions affected the salmon and their determining factors. For example, although the fish typically selected a temperature of 14–18°C when available (i.e., this is their preferred temperature in culture), and thus were found deeper in the cage as surface water temperatures peaked, they continued to use the full range of depths available during the warmest part of the summer. The depth occupied by the fish and heart rate were greater during the day, but the latter effect was not temperature-related. Finally, while the fish generally swam at 0.4–1.0 body lengths per second (25–60 cm s−1), their activity and the proportion of time spent using non-steady swimming (i.e., burst-and-coast swimming) increased when feeding was stopped at high temperatures.Conclusion: Data storage tags that record multiple parameters are an effective tool to understand how cage-site conditions and management influence salmon (fish) behavior, physiology, and welfare in culture, and can even be used to provide fine-scale mapping of environmental conditions. The data collected here, and that in recent publications, strongly suggest that pathogen (biotic) challenges in combination with high temperatures, not high temperatures + moderate hypoxia (~70% air saturation) by themselves, are the biggest climate-related challenge facing the salmon aquaculture industry outside of Tasmania.