Page 34 - Advert: Cape Breton County

ISSUE : Issue 41

Published by Ronald Caplan on 1986/1/1

things, you know. The technology was never given the opportunity • The oyster thing was canned. (When Devco pulled out, were you through?) No, they transferred me to the fin fish, the salmon and the trout projects. They started off raising trout in a similar way to the oysters, but on a smaller scale. They had trout in North Harbour. The old people up there, they still see trout com? ing into North Harbour from escapees. And they were down in Johnstown Harbour. And Dundee. Oyster Pond (near Englishtown). That was in 1974. And they were working in conjunction with the Nova Scotia Depart? ment of Fisheries. That was in 1976, '77. It started off with just a couple of cages. Then they found out that Little Narrows Pond--after a nijm- ber of years of monitoring temperatures and whatnot--had a very extraordinary tem? perature profile in the winter months. Un? derneath 2 feet of ice, it would be 5 and 6 degrees. So they said, this is a great place to try and hold fish. So they put a cage or two of fish in there in the winter? time, and they found that they did well. They tried that out at Seal Island, and the trout froze solid. Blood freezes at -0.7 degrees C, and it would go down to -1.5 at Seal Island in the wintertime. So here they were harvesting these popsicles in the middle of January. In water ??hat had no ice--it was just water--but the fish were frozen solid--you'd be picking these fish up like boards out of the water that was liquid. And then there was that fiasco that hap? pened in--was that 1978?--when the enteric red mouth happened. It was a disease epi? demic that struck the fish, both Little Narrows and Seal Island, and something like a hundred thousand pounds of fish had to be disposed of. It was buried up in the Highlands, mine pits. The Fish Health Unit, which is a section of the Department of Fisheries just newly formed for aquicul- ture people. It had identified the disease as ERM. At that time they hadn't monitored ERM or found this particular disease any? where in the Maritimes, so they assumed that Devco had brought that disease in from this hatchery in the States where the fish had been purchased. So for fear of contaminating the wild stock of fish, they felt it would be best to destroy all the fish. They asked Devco to destroy all the ''';"-<- % ft'fe''"' fish, even though probably only 3-5% of them were actually dying from the disease. For fear of contamination. And it was only a year or so later that they found out that almost the entire population of trout in Nova Scotia are carriers of ERM, and it's a normal disease in our river systems. And it wasn't introduced, that it's found all over the place. It just happened to be that in concentrated conditions, husbandry conditions of farming, that it showed it? self. Probably higher density rearing. So Devco, surprisingly, didn't can the fish project at that stage, which is unu? sual, because the whole population was an? nihilated. They decided to give it a go a- gain and keep it going. I became Production Manager of the fish farm. I was that for about 3 years. (Did you ;think trout was really a possible thing here?) Qh, yeah. It's definitely a possible thing. I mean, you can grow the things quite effectively, there's no ques- Treasure Cove High Quality Gifts and Handcrafts AND A SELECTION OF QUALITY BOOKS Phone 564-8158 Corner Charlotte St. & Townsend St. Sydney High Quality Gifts and Crafts from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and Abroad 199 Townsend St., Sydney American Red & Black Plaid Lumber Shirts Women's Amber Capes Ladies' & Men's Pea Jackets Wool-Lined Mountain Parkas 6or Tex Parkas Also: Royal Robin Ocean Pacific Ditrani Ski la Vasque Hiking Shoes & Boots New Balance Hiking Boots Phone 539-7165 (35)

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