You Know Big Oil and Big Pharma But Are You Familiar With Big Salmon?

Or, at minimum, wannabe big salmon.

These are the genetically-engineered fish that we have been tracking for a few years.

Please, please don not let them escape into the wild. 

 

Here's the other wannabe biggie:

Norway's Atlantic Sapphire A/S Wants HALF the U.S. Salmon Market, Starting With a A $350 Million Farm In Florida (ASA-ME:Oslo)
That's by the year 2031. The goal for 2026 is a more modest 100,000 tonnes....

From The Fish Site:

AquaBounty looks to raise $320 million for new land-based salmon farm

AquaBounty has calculated that the development of its planned 10,000-tonne capacity salmon farm in Pioneer, Ohio, is likely to cost up to $320 million.

“As we’ve progressed on the final design for our 10,000 metric ton Ohio farm, we have been able to further refine our expected project cost, which we estimate to be in the range of $290 million to $320 million, including a reserve for potential contingencies of $30 million. The increase from our previous estimates is attributable to several factors, including the cost of building materials and the Recirculating Aquaculture System technology, along with the inclusion of an on-site processing plant and water treatment facility,” said Sylvia Wulf, CEO of AquaBounty, in a press release.

In terms of raising the necessary capital, the company is looking for the “placement of a mix of tax-exempt and taxable bonds through the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, whose board has approved the issuance of up to $300 million in bonds to support the financing of the project"....

....MUCH MORE

Can collateralized salmon obligations be far behind? Traditionalists prefer the wrapper to be a crisp corn taco shell but a soft tortilla.... umm wait, sorry...where was I?

Our last look at AguaBounty was in May: 

"AquaBounty’s first commercial harvest of its GE salmon will be this month"

I'm not sure that this is the best way for me to get my omega-3 fatty acids. The genetic engineering was not focused on nutrition but rather on getting our finny friends to grow faster.

From AgFunder, May 13:

• US genetically engineered (GE) salmon farmer AquaBounty will harvest its first commercial genetically engineered salmon this month from its Indiana facility. The first harvest, which totals five metric tons, has already been sold, according to the startup.
• AquaBounty Atlantic salmon are raised in freshwater from hatch to harvest in land-based recirculating aquaculture systems where every element of the system is carefully controlled and monitored.
• By adding a growth hormone-regulating gene from the Pacific Chinook and a promoter gene from an ocean pout, AquaBounty’s resulting fish is capable of growing year-round instead of just the spring and summer.

Why it matters:

AquaBounty received US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval for its GE salmon in 2015 but was immediately met with consumer backlash over the fact that its salmon would not be marketed with a label identifying it as genetically engineered....

....MORE

Previously:
Genetically Modified Salmon Producer, AquaBounty to Sell Shares as Losses Deepen
AquaBounty’s Genetically Engineered Salmon is Coming
AquaBounty Is Now Selling Their Indiana-Raised Atlantic Salmon (but not the genetically modified fish, yet)
FrankenFish: "AquaBounty unveils 50,000 tonne target"
Here Come the Frankenfish: GMO Salmon Coming to a Store Near You

They absolutely must not allow these things to get anywhere near ocean salmon (or Great Lakes salmon for that matter).
And though the writer takes a blithely upbeat look at this development, we are posting it for information purposes only....

And in completely unrelated news, from the journal Nature:
Transgenic Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes Transfer Genes into a Natural Population