Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. When the North Atlantic’s stocks of cod, tuna, halibut, and other big ocean predators threatened to collapse in the 1990s after decades of overfishing, consumers and conservationists alike turned their hopes to farming: raising pellet-fattened fish in net pens in bays and channels. But a sweeping analysis published last February shows that farming has only made matters worse for wild salmon.

Salmon farms were already known to weaken wild populations by exposing