Virus killing Chile's salmon also is indicting its fishing methods

Looking out over the low green mountains jutting through miles of placid waterways in Puerto Montt in southern Chile, it is hard to imagine anything could be amiss. But beneath the rows of neatly laid netting around the fish farms just offshore, the salmon are dying.

A virus called infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, is killing millions of salmon destined for export to Japan, Europe and the United States. The spreading plague has sent shivers through Chile's third-largest industry, which has embittered locals by laying off more than 1,000 workers.

It has also opened the companies to fresh charges from biologists and environmentalists who say that the breeding of salmon in crowded underwater pens is contaminating once-pristine waters and producing potentially unhealthy fish.

Some say the industry is raising its fish in ways that court disaster, and producers are coming under new pressure to change their methods to preserve southern Chile's waters for tourists and other marine life.

"All these problems are related to an underlying lack of sanitary controls," said Felipe C. Cabello, a professor in the Department of microbiology and immunology at New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y., that has studied Chile's fishing industry. "Parasitic infections, viral infections, fungal infections are all disseminated when the fish are stressed and the centers are too close together."

Industry executives acknowledge some of the problems, but they reject the notion their practices are unsafe for consumers. U.S. officials also say the new virus is not harmful to humans.

But the latest outbreak has occurred after a rash of nonviral illnesses in recent years that the companies acknowledge have led them to use high levels of antibiotics. Researchers say the practice is widespread in the Chilean industry, which is a mix of international and Chilean producers. Some of those antibiotics, they say, are prohibited for use on animals in the United States.

Many of those salmon still end up in U.S. grocery stores, where about 29 percent of Chilean exports are destined.

NEW YORK TIMES

Excavations in a cave in the mountains of northern Spain have uncovered the oldest known remains of human ancestors in Western Europe, scientists reported Wednesday.

The fossils of a lower jaw and teeth, more than 1.1 million years old, were found in sediments along with stone tools and animal bones that appeared to have been butchered. The remains have been attributed to the previously known species Homo antecessor, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

The discovery is described in the current issue of the journal Nature by a team of scientists led by Eudald Carbonell of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleontology and Social Evolution at Tarragona, Spain.

The scientists, noting that the earliest presence of human ancestors in Europe is "one of the most debated topics in paleoanthropology," said the site of Sima del Elefante in the Atapuerca Mountains held the "oldest, most accurately dated record" of both fossils and artifacts of human occupation in Western Europe.

Until now, the earliest remains of Homo antecessor, found in the same mountains, were 800,000 years old. Far to the east, in the republic of Georgia, recent fossil discoveries show early Homo had moved into parts of Eurasia from Africa about 1.9 million years ago.

NEW YORK TIMES