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Cooke has recovered and accounted for about 120,000 of the 300,000 fish that were at the fish farm.

“It’s distressing, as I put a lot of value in our native fish,” said de Bosch Kemper, particularly since salmon returns to B.C. rivers this year are extremely low.

To date, Atlantic salmon have shown up as far north as Sechelt and as far west as Port Renfrew on the west coast of Vancouver Island, said Andrew Thomson, regional director for fisheries management at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Thompson said the department will continue to track catches reported to its Atlantic Salmon Watch program and he encourages anyone who does encounter the non-native fish to call in to its reporting line.

Thomson said his staff will pick rivers to monitor where the escaped fish are likely to try and spawn and will selectively remove the fish if they are found in significant numbers.

“We’re informed by what’s occurred in the past,” Thomson said, including previous large escapes that happened in the 1990s.

Washington State farms suffered a handful of escapes of between 100,000 and 360,000 farmed salmon during that period, Thomson said. B.C.’s biggest was about 88,000.

In Washington on Saturday, Gov. Jay Inslee ordered a hold on any new permits for ocean net pens until a thorough investigation of the Cooke Aquaculture incident.

And in B.C., a First Nations group is past the sixth day of its peaceful occupation of a Marine Harvest salmon farm off the north coast of Vancouver Island to pressure for its removal from a spot where they contend the company does not have First Nations approval.