Chile salmon industry hopes early warning updates can thwart damaging peak algal bloom season

Chilean salmon producers are stepping up precautionary and contingency measures for the peak algal bloom season, which has been so damaging to production and earnings numbers over recent summers.

The Chilean Salmon Council, a trade group representing 52 percent of Chilean production, is issuing a monthly bulletin warning of the potential dangers from so called red tide outbreaks in three main producing regions: Los Lagos, Aysen and Magallanes.

A traffic light system used in conjunction with maps of these regions highlights the absence of harmful algal bloom microalgae (green dot), low density populations of algal blooms (yellow dot) with a red dot used to denote the presence of harmful algal blooms.