Subscribe & stay up-to-date with ASF
Cold Ocean Salmon, a division of Canada’s Cooke, experienced a higher number of Atlantic salmon mortalities due to extreme winter weather at one of its farms in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador than originally thought, the company has reported.
Cooke said, in a statement published Monday, that it lost 28.5% of the salmon it was raising at its Manual Arm site due to “severe winter storm events experienced over the month of February”, more than the 19.0% it said it originally reported on March 13.
Cooke didn’t specify in its latest press release how many fish that was but, in a subsequent response to questions from Undercurrent News, spokesperson Joel Richardson clarified that the company has lost 170,714 of the 599,000 fish it had at the site on Feb. 15.
That’s much more than the 77,000 mortalities noted in earlier reports by Canadian newspapers.
The company said in its release that the fish did not test positive for any reportable diseases and have been removed from the site. A regularly scheduled fallow period has now begun per the provincial regulations.