They live and grow in net pens that hang on lead lines around floating metal sidewalks. They eat brown pellets of fish meal that bleed an orange synthetic pigment that makes their otherwise gray flesh the pink hue expected by consumers.

One of the shiny silvery salmon reflects the sunlight on a clear winter day as it jumps from the water. Nearby, many of its siblings wait in a seine net to be vacuumed up a tube and sent through a grader that sorts them by size.

Secret Harbor, accessible only by private boat, is home to three of Cypress Island Inc.'s eight net pen facilities in Washington. The company is the only Atlantic salmon farmer in the state, but the firm's Norwegian parent operates net pens in British Columbia, Scotland, Norway and the Faroe Islands, north of Scotland.

Cypress Island Inc. produces from 12 million to 15 million pounds of Atlantic salmon a year for grocery stores and restaurants across the country. Kevin Bright, a marine biologist and general manager of Cypress Island, says criticisms of fish farms are inaccurate and outdated.

"If done properly, this industry can be regulated in a way that is environmentally sensitive," he said.

Bright said the company is just filling consumer demand for fish, a demand driven by people hungry for healthy food. But consumers' wallets also play a part when they decide whether to buy farmed or wild salmon.

"It's more affordable," Bright said. "Not everyone can buy a Copper River fish for $20 a pound."

Atlantic life cycle

At a hatchery in Rochester, in southwest Washington, a brood stock of Atlantic salmon serves as parents of the company's final products.

Keeping the fish healthy is a priority, Bright said, because Atlantic salmon are not native to Pacific waters, so they're more vulnerable to diseases that native salmon have developed some immunities against.

Cypress Island's Atlantic salmon are individually vaccinated against several diseases when they are smolts, just a few inches long. When a year old, the salmon are taken to a small net pen operation by Hope Island, near Deception Pass. Within six months, when they're at least a pound, they're moved to larger net pens, including the three at Cypress Island.

As they grow, they are repeatedly graded, sized and moved into a pen with like-sized fish, to avoid being edged out for food by bigger fish. By the time they're 10 to 12 pounds, the fish are taken live to a processor in Seattle, where they're gutted. Within eight hours, the salmon are flown and trucked on ice to customers.

Escaping fish

The company's pens use heavy-gauge nylon nets. To reduce breaks, the net strength has been increased the past five years, from 78 pounds of breaking strength to 400 pounds. The nets are replaced every four to five years, said Bill Clark, Cypress Island's site manager.

Still, storms and net tears allow some fish to escape. Until this year, companies only had to report large escapes - more than 3,000 smolts or more than 1,000 nearly full-grown fish. New rules now require companies to submit a balance sheet each year documenting how many fish were produced, how many died and how many might have escaped.

Cypress Island's last large breakout came four years ago, when 100,000 escaped from a pen near Bainbridge Island.

Cypress Island has considered raising only female offspring, which could be produced by pressure-shocking the salmon at a certain stage of development, Bright said. An all-female stock would prevent the possibility of escaped Atlantic salmon colonizing in local waters, but males grow faster than females, so that could disrupt the company's steady supply of fresh fish, he said.

A new state rule requires that Cypress Island's fish have an identifying mark on a bone close to each fish's head, produced by changing the water temperature when the fish are young. With the mark, any fish that escape will be easily identifiable as Cypress Island's stock, rather than salmon from pens in British Columbia.

Washington has introduced many fish from other regions to stock streams and ponds for sports fishers, including a failed attempt at populating state waters with Atlantic salmon. While Cypress Island must work to prevent escapes, Bright says he's bewildered by people's reaction to the idea of Atlantic salmon in local waters.

"Washington has lots of non-indigenous fish," he said. "I don't understand why, for this fish, everybody's screaming bloody murder."

Industry changing

The net pen sites leased by Cypress Island were owned by "mom and pop" operations up to 20 years ago, Bright said. While many of them were producing a stock of native coho, western European countries started producing Atlantic salmon, fostering worldwide demand for salmon.

Washington fish farms switched to the more docile Atlantic salmon with brood stock eggs approved by the federal government. After several changes in ownership, Cypress Island's Norwegian owner acquired the remaining net pen sites in Puget Sound.

Bright said the industry is changing, in part to improve production methods, in part to keep costs down in a competitive market.

In one change, antibiotics are used much less frequently, because vaccinations and better breeding are reducing outbreaks of disease, he said. At Cypress Island, less than half of 1 percent of the fish feed used in 2001 was treated with antibiotics, Bright said.

"There are many fish that leave here without ever being medicated," he said.

Still, some fish pick up diseases, and sea lice are occasionally seen on fish, a common condition in the wild. But no large breakouts of disease or bacteria have occurred in Puget Sound net pens in recent years, Bright said.

The salmon are fed pellets that are three-fourths fish meal and one-fourth vegetable protein and soy meal. The company uses 1.2 pounds of feed to produce each pound of salmon, a much lower ratio than before.

Synthetic pigments are added to the feed to create the pink coloring that wild salmon pick up from eating plankton and invertebrates. Bright corrects an employee who uses the term "dye," as critics have done in literature about farmed salmon.

"It makes it sound like we're dipping them into paint," Bright said. "It's different from a red dye No. 6 that makes your ketchup red. That's a scare tactic used to scare customers away."

Cypress Island paid $66,000 last year for the 137 acres of tidelands it leases from the state. Critics worry that fish waste, dead fish and uneaten feed will destroy the marine ecosystem below.

The state Department of Ecology monitors the site to ensure the company complies with its federal permit to discharge fish waste into the water, and looks for algae blooms that can decrease oxygen in the water.

Bright said the area under the fish farm is an enhanced ecosystem, covered in barnacles and mussels, with the pens acting like a reef. Swift currents send the waste out of the harbor, he said.

Financial challenges

Bright won't divulge financial details about the company's Washington operations, but its Pan Fish parent company faces financial troubles as well as legal challenges from B.C. Indians.

In British Columbia, Heiltsuk Nation has sued Pan Fish over the company's plan for a hatchery to produce 10 million smolts a year for its B.C. fish farms. The tribe claims the company was building on tribal property without consultation.

Heiltsuk members also fear the hatchery would expand salmon farming on Vancouver Island's central coast, threatening their wild salmon stocks. Protesters from Nuxalk Nation and an environmental group occupied the construction site for several days last month.

According to Intrafish, a seafood industry news organization, Pan Fish lost $172 million last year. Intrafish says the loss is the largest ever by a Norwegian fisheries or aquaculture company.

Last month, Pan Fish's acting CEO said the company's financial situation would mean "game over" if prices for farmed salmon didn't rise.

Bright said he couldn't speculate whether Pan Fish's situation would have any impact on the Puget Sound operations.

Still, the wholesale price for farmed Atlantic has dropped the past decade from $5 a pound to $1.60, making it less than the gem it was in the early 1990s.

Cypress Island hasn't discussed switching its Puget Sound net pens over to more profitable fish, Bright said. He still considers aquaculture the future of seafood production, be it salmon or other fish, such as black cod or halibut.