You really hit on most of the things people fear with farmed fish, especially with farmed fish escaping into the wild. The most interesting part to me is the idea that the fish farming industry could either change “what a salmon is” or disregard the evolutionary path that salmon have gone on to become the wild populations they are today. This points to just what bothers many people about the meat industry in general – that in order to produce as much product as possible, farms are motivated to create or breed populations that are able to maximize the meat output for consumers, regardless of the health or wellbeing of the creatures or the environment around them. If these fish are able to escape, it follows that it could present a risk to wild populations. However, humans have been modifying their food sources for as long as we’ve been farming. Does modification of a species through direct genetic modification or selective breeding inherently mean a negative outcome?
