They have a reporter covering aquaculture at all times and they can not keep divulging every single fish death weekly or even daily hence commercial in confidence. Even Huon wouldnt tell people how elevated the mortality in one of their affected trout pens are. Mortality is just a common thing in aquaculture and that is an inevitable fact in aquaculture. Imagine if tassal keep declaring every deaths and what that would do to a publically traded company. You don't expect any other company to report exact sale figures every week or even daily. Aquaculture is a hot topic politically in Tasmania where the mercury is based. Every fish death would be cooked to perfection whether politically by left wing activists like ET or induce gratuitous irrational panic for retail investors who have no clue about aquaculture operation or marine science in general. To illustrate there was one poster who questions whether tassal made a bad decision in fattening their salmon and not selling everything at peak prices. I gave a fundamental response to the question if you guys care to scroll up. So that is why most if not all businesses, not just tassal, have commercial in confidence in play.
For fish deaths,
If you look at annual reports in HUO, Tassal or every single aquaculture operation on earth with absolutely no exception, mortality IS ALWAYS relatively high. Sometimes 13%, sometimes 8% and so on and so forth, dont take my words for it, go look it up in the reports. Mortality is especially high when it comes to smolts (little baby fishes) and in that article petuna lost maybe around 3% from memory. Layman would think that is horrid but petuna themselves expected around 1 to 1.5 percents of smolts to die, they expected this.
The virus that was blown up and framed as an "outbreak" in their propaganda by environment tasmania, which is an extreme left activists is from pilchard, a type of fish. They are small and often swims pass the salmon cages and thus can infect salmons. The manifestation of the virus tend to be elevated when temperature of the water goes up because warmer waters are not optimal for salmons. A good analogy would be flu seasons around the changing of seasons in human population. Just like us, smolts are more likely to die than bigger salmons that tend to just fight it off just like humans fight off cold virus. Do we panic everytime it is flu season? Not really, but the media definitely make a big deal out of it.
I don't know what else to say here. More questions?
