An easy to read, super accurate, super edicational post that should open some eyes as to how insignificant this spill is (and to what else is going on in our oceans that should REALLY make people's blood boil). This guy did an awesome job of a brief history, past events, and what is currently going on.
https://craigmedred.news/2017/08/27/bad-salmon/Some points people should really take to heart:
"The two scientists found that pink salmon were so heavily grazing the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea that short-tailed shearwaters, which eat similar foods, were going hungry."
"...researchers reported that “straying” hatchery fish have flooded some Alaska rivers in such numbers that they helped cause “salmon-induced oxygen depletion” that choked and killed wild fish."
"In Prince William Sound, Alaska,
77 percent of surveyed streams contained hatchery pink salmon
from three or more hatcheries, and hatchery strays comprised zero to
98 percent of pink salmon escapement within individual streams."
Perhaps one of the most important parts of that paper that people should read:
"It appears that the issues of disease transfer between wild and farmed fish and of escapes are minor. Instead, declines in wild stocks are attributed to habitat degradation, changing oceanic conditions, and effects from breeding with public hatchery fish, together with high harvest rates and a decrease in adult size." and goes on to say after that "
Any environmental impacts from escaped farmed Pacific salmonid are likely to be dwarfed by the number of releases by public hatcheries,
which are breeding native, wild species."
There is a reason Atlantic's are used here. One of the BIGGEST issues on the east coast with salmon farming was the use of a native species. Escaped fish spawned and destroyed the gene pool, and diseases were able to spread between the same species. Pacific coast farms actually use to use mostly Chinook and Coho and switched to Atlantic's because of the research pertaining to this.