Describe potential ethical issues or concerns raised by a visit.

Earth has an ever-growing population, with more people born each day added to the total
collective number of people and the required needs of the population. One of the challenges of
this situation is that feeding all these people is a logistics nightmare, however, one of the
solutions to that problem is large-scale organized farming. Aqua Bounty is one such business as
they grow and sell genetically modified salmon, providing the market and populace with plentiful
salmon. However, large-scale organized farming often has its problems and concerns, with
Aquabounty not being the exception. There are plenty of possible ethical issues or concerns
that the company could encounter. Especially since raising, regulating, and selling GMO salmon
is a relatively new practice. It's only been 22 years since the company was founded as AF
Protein in 1991, and recently in 2015 Aquabounty finally had its salmon approved by the FDA,
and in 2020, its first batch of salmon was harvested as a commercial product. With such a
relatively short history and only recent sales of their products, one has to ask about the quality
of the salmon they produce and whether or not all of them are safe for consumption.

First, there are the ethics of growing salmon in constrained environments instead of their natural
habitat. Surprisingly, no one has drawn a comparison of Aquabounty growing plenty of salmon
in limited spaces, to factory farms or “concentrated animal feeding operations”, CAFO, their
proper scientific term. Aquabounty business model is just factory fish farming with the added
genetic engineering done to fish when they are eggs to make them larger and produce more
meat. Along with giving them other modifications so they are more appealing to buyers and
consumers. When we were shown the indoor tour, although the salmon are grown in large vats,
they are also crammed into them with many other salmon, limiting the amount of free space to
move around and having salmon consistently bump into one another.

Even if Aquabounty were to switch to their sea cage farms, which better naturally stimulate a
salmon's natural environment, another moral quandary would be raised. By raising the salmon
in net cages, the opportunity is created for one of the salmon being able to escape and
subsequently mix with the local natural salmon population. Despite the fact the fish are modified
mostly to be female and all of them sterile, it has been proven before that the sterility of the fish
isn't a hundred percent certain. This brings up the question if it’s morally sound to raise fish in
net cages when it always presents the possibility of them leaving and potentially destroying the
careful balancing act of the ecosystem. Another possible ethical consequence is how any
salmon potentially escaping will damage the salmon population is how that will negatively affect
the people who depend on that population. Such as the Indigenous people, who depend on that
ecosystem for their food when they go there and catch it.

Another ethical concern is how Aquabounty’s salmon meat color is not its natural color. The
salmon at Aquabounty are given a chemical, (), which makes the meat of the salmon a vibrant
orange. They do this because of the cultural misconception that salmon meat is naturally a
vibrant orange when in reality, the only salmon that have orange meat are the ones caught in
the deep Atlantic, whose diet consists of shrimp and other deep-sea aquatic life. The salmon
caught in freshwater rivers or bred in the tanks have only white meat, on account their diet
mainly consists of bugs or feed respectively. Since Aquabounty has already genetically modified
the color of the salmon meat, what’s stopping them from genetically modifying other parts of the
fish, there is no limit in place for how much they can modify the salmon, and ()

Now that some of the ethical concerns about Aquabounty have been covered, it's time to look at
the concerns. Concerns about the Aquabounty's quality of the salmon and facility. Plus, the
actual viability of Aquabounty's process is being able to produce its stated goal of salmon. The
facility we visited was relatively clean for a fish hatchery and seemed to be in good shape, even
still I went looking online to see if this standard was the same for the other Aquabounty facilities.
On the Aquabounty website, they specifically state this, “The waters our Atlantic salmon swim in
never come in contact with harmful diseases and toxins that can be a concern with traditional
sea cage farms and net pens “. This is in direct contradiction to information brought to light by
an employee, Braydon Humphrey, who provided evidence that a fungal disease from the
feeding systems wiped out a third of the first harvest of salmon and that the vats holding the
salmon were continuously contaminated with toxic materials. This is concerning because this is
an instance of Aquabounty not keeping its word regarding the quality of salmon and the fact that
not all facilities follow the guidelines like the PEI Aquabounty does, meaning the quality of
salmon could drastically change from facility to facility.

Another concern is the viability of Aquabounty as a business model due to the fragileness of the
salmon eggs. Our tour guide specifically said they had to be careful when pulling out the
hatchery trays full of salmon eggs because the eggs couldn’t take that much jostling. If the
hatchery were ever to be bumped into hard enough, then it’s likely a lot of salmon eggs would
be lost, with the process having to be started all over again. Another con about the salmon eggs
is that about (insert number out of whole batches) have to be taken up to the lab, where they
are then placed in a (insert machine) and shaken and crushed to verify whether or not they are
triploid instead of diploid. Furthermore, if there isn’t a certain percentage of triploid in a batch
then the entire batch is disposed of. This means that the first period of the salmon development
and growth is sensitive and entire batches of eggs can be thrown out if they don’t meet the
necessary standards, not to mention any batches of salmon thrown out later on because the
salmon have been infected with a disease or the quality is subpar. These necessary and
potential losses of both batches and salmon seem like they would impede AquaBounty from
reaching its goals of producing 55,000 tons of salmon annually, much less its ability to viably
work as a business model.

In conclusion, while Aquabounty is one of the many biotechnology companies working toward a
solution to provide enough food to people, there are matters of ethics and concerns that need to
be considered moving forward. It’s fledgling and liable to encounter trial and error as it grows
and maximizes its ability to efficiently grow and raise genetically modified salmon.