Christmas has come early for Denmark’s anglers: up to 80,000 rainbow trout have escaped into the open sea after a cargo ship rammed a fish farm, a local broadcaster has reported, prompting urgent calls for help to catch them.
TV2/FYN said the trout, worth up to DKr 10m (£1.2m), swam off on Tuesday when a freighter heading from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to the southern Danish port of Kolding rammed the aquafarm, in the Little Belt strait between Denmark’s mainland and the island of Funen.
Tim Petersen, the farm owner, told the broadcaster that the trout, which weigh 3kg (6.6lb) each, had been scheduled to be slaughtered this week. “We’ll be seeking compensation,” he said.
But the accident has alarmed environmentalists, who said the farmed trout could not have escaped at a worse time because wild sea trout were swimming up the island’s streams and inlets to spawn.
“Sea trout eggs are a favourite food for rainbow trout,” Søren Knabe, a local angler and member of the Vandpleje Fyn environmental association, told TV2/FYN. “The escaped rainbow trout will follow right behind the tails of the sea trout and eat their eggs.”
Jon Svendsen, a researcher from Denmark’s National Institute of Aquatic Resources, told Reuters the danger that the escaped fish would disturb the wild trouts’ eggs was real, although the farmed fish were unlikely to survive much longer than a few months.
In the meantime, Knabe said, “all amateur fishermen with fishing gear should get it out, go to the Little Belt, and start fishing”.
Angler Andreas Lyngø told TV2/FYN he came from Aarhus for the occasion and was shocked by the number of fish he had seen. “There are rainbow trout everywhere,” he said. “We’ve already seen 200, and we’ve hardly moved.”
Although some anglers said the escaped fish would take time to adjust to life in the wild, and were unlikely to start taking the bait for four or five days, Lyngø was determined. “These fish have got to die,” he said. “They’ll destroy the natural population.”