Last week's must-reads: Salmon price-fixing, Walton's aquaculture buy, China's back-door shrimp

Salmon industry execs would do well to have regular heart check-ups to make sure they are fit to face whatever the week throws at them.

This week, the Norwegian industry learned of a second class-action lawsuit against them in the US for alleged price fixing.

While just a small company, the turn out of a second plaintiff begins to whiff strongly of the tuna collusion lawsuits that have been playing out for the last couple of years and is likely to open the floodgates on a raft of new court cases.

But it wasn’t just the Norwegian salmon producers under attack. Mowi faced action in Canada which puts a question mark over its hatchery expansion plans in the country, and in the US reporter Rachel Sapin asked whether the United States’ only viable salmon farming state would get stymied by opponents.

And as if to put the icing on the cake, Norwegian salmon prices slid even further in what one particularly loquacious colleague called a “bloodbath."

Although, let’s not feel too bad for them. Mowi still has $360 million to plow into its new subsea salmon farming experiment and SalMar’s millionaire owner is putting his money to good use blockading a wind farm that probably ruins the view from his Norwegian hillside multi-billion NOK house.

In Russia, the cash is also rolling in as the country prepared to auction $1.5 billion in crab quotas.

Big names were once again in the news as a Walton-backed aquaculture firm acquired an R&D company and Patagonia and Whole Foods joined a raft of others protesting the controversial Pebble Mine plans threatening Bristol Bay’s salmon fishery.

Moving south, Senior Reporter Lola Navarro discovered an interesting phenomenon affecting Ecuador’s shrimp prices, where the closure of the Vietnamese “back door” into China is having a knock-on on profits. And over in Australia, IntraFish broke the news that BioMar has brought on a New Zealand King Salmon exec to head up its feed operations.

Finally, late-breaking news Friday that Peru's north-central anchovy quota, the most important single source of fishmeal in the world, would be slashed by nearly 40 percent.