The fight against the open net pen industry is a part of the fight for the future of the planet. Industrial salmon farming in open net pens wreaks havoc on the environment. It has severe costs for our planet and facilitates immense suffering of millions of farmed salmon. This is a merciless and inhumane way of producing food.
 

Salmon farming in open net pens is risking the very existence of Iceland’s unique wild salmon that inhabited the island long before the first human settlements in the second half of the 9th century.
 

This industry releases unfiltered waste into our oceans. Fish faeces, leftover feed, pesticides, drugs, microplastics and heavy metals flow unhindered in enormous quantities through the nets. The chemicals and plastics are lethal to other types of sea life.
 

Iceland’s salmon populations come from a specific evolutionary line. The wild Icelandic salmon population is around 60.000. Each river has its own special salmon clan adapted to the local environment, its birth river, by natural selection for thousands of years.
 

The industry loses a huge amount of farmed salmon from the net pens. The genetic mixing of the escapees with wild salmon has devastating consequences on the wild fish as their ability to survive in nature, shaped by 10.000 years of evolution, is severely compromised and will eventually lead to their extinction.

Aegis fights for nature conservation and supports the fight agains open pen net fish farming.