Mongabay has mapped out the salmon-farming concessions off Chile’s coast and how they overlap with its patchwork of marine protected areas.
In Chile’s four southernmost regions, five protected areas have salmon-farming concessions within them, with one having more than 300. This threatens the unique ecosystems of Patagonia.
The 416 concessions that lie inside marine protected areas belong to 32 companies, the top three of which control more than a third of the concessions.
In 2012, the Comau Fjord witnessed a massive coral die-off that researchers linked to a combination of natural volcanic activity and water oxygen depletion caused by salmon farming.
In 2003, biologist Vreni Häussermann and a group of researchers started surveying underwater life at a site in the Comau Fjord, in Chilean Patagonia. The team found that sea cucumbers, bristle worms, anemones, corals, gorgonians, crustaceans and large schools of mussels abounded in the area. Every year for a decade, Häussermann, a German-Chilean scientist who has studied Patagonia’s marine ecosystems for more than 20 years, wrote down what she observed. Changes from one year to the next were very gradual, but when in 2013 she compared photographs she had taken with those from 2003, she realized there was almost nothing left of what she had seen the first time 10 years ago.
