adopt-a-fry.org

How Long Can B.C. Avoid ISA?
by Alexandra Morton
June 14, 2009

http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/4273-pandemic-british-columbia-and-infectious-salmon-anemia-virus.html

Dear Editor;

Mary Ellen Walling has tried to make light of the risk of ISA virus entering BC waters.

I would like to ask the BC salmon farmers to stand behind this statement and test every one of their fish farms today for the Infectious Salmon Anemia virus and report back to the BC public.

This seems a small request given the scope of impact of this virus in Chile.  ISA virus, like bird and swine flu, is easily tracked and if it does arrive we will know where it came from and who brought it here. The fish farm industry published several articles earlier this year on the high risk of this Global epidemic coming to BC: “How long can B.C. avoid ISA?”  ISA (Intrafish Jan 12, 2009)

    “Far from coming under control the virus continuously alludes preventative measures, passing through the safety net of the most stringent control measures in the world. Aquaculture Fish Jefo Nutrition Inc. Fish Vet Group “  (The FishSite attached)

This prompted me to write the Minister of Fisheries requesting the BC border be closed to import of farm fish embryos (eggs).  The Minister erroneously responded that ISA does not travel in the eggs (see attached), when scientific publications are showing the opposite http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19034606

If DFO is not going to take steps to protect the eastern Pacific from this virus, it will have to be up to the fish farmers.  I would suggest it would be cheaper for the industry to make the tests now, destroy any infected stocks, and close the border immediately than to risk being found responsible for an epidemic that could alter this coast forever. If neither DFO nor the fish farmers are going to do this I invite the BC public to contact me and we will test for this virus ourselves.

Standing by,

Alexandra Morton   

 

The Globe and Mail

Fisheries ignored 500 names. Can it ignore 5,000?
by Mark Hume
March 23, 2009

VANCOUVER — The form letter that Premier Gordon Campbell and federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea keep ignoring is just getting longer.

In circulation for only a few weeks, it already has nearly 5,000 signatories, and more names are being added daily as it circulates on the Web.

When it first went to the politicians, 500 names were affixed. It was ignored, so it went back into circulation and soon was resubmitted with 2,000 names, then with 4,000. It’s making the rounds again this week, and is still growing.

Started by research scientist and fisheries activist Alexandra Morton, the letter asks the government to take decisive action to protect wild salmon from the threats posed by salmon farms.

One of the key requests is that salmon farms be moved away from wild salmon migration routes because of the transmission of sea lice from caged fish.

The people who signed the letter worry that salmon farms are an unacceptable risk to wild stocks.

And that fear is about to be heightened by a study being released today that shows juvenile sockeye from the Fraser River are encountering fish farms at an alarming rate.

Michael Price, a biologist with Raincoast Conservation Foundation, and Craig Orr, executive director of Watershed Watch, studied 800 wild sockeye collected in 2007-08 in northern Georgia Strait.

About 70 per cent of those fish had one to 20 sea lice attached to them. And the fish caught near farms were the most likely to be infected.

"The lice levels appear to be higher near farms," said Mr. Price, who is still analyzing the data.

Past studies by Ms. Morton have documented the spread of lice from farms to wild pink and chum salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, an area off Vancouver Island’s northeast shoulder.

But the study by Mr. Price and Dr. Orr looks at sockeye, and for the first time uses DNA analysis to trace the infected fish to their watershed of origin.

The researchers conclude most of the sockeye they caught migrating near salmon farms (60 per cent in 2007 and 99 per cent in 2008) came from the Fraser River.

Sockeye are the most valuable of all salmon species because they draw a higher price on the market and because they are the fish of choice for native food and ceremonial fisheries.

Mr. Price and Dr. Orr have now linked the most valuable fish, from B.C.’s most important salmon river, to farms and lice.

Mr. Price said juvenile sockeye can follow three routes as they migrate through Georgia Strait on the outward leg of their journey to the Gulf of Alaska.

"But all these routes converge before the Broughton Archipelago [at the north end of Georgia Strait] where there are a dozen farms," he said. "It’s clear that no fish can make this journey without encountering a farm."

Mr. Price said studies have shown that one to three lice can kill a juvenile pink salmon, so it’s fair to assume sockeye are dying as well.

Could this help explain the collapse of Fraser River sockeye stocks?

Some people will no doubt find this an alarming possibility.

The form letter, triggered by concerns about pink and chum, describes wild salmon as "the backbone of the B.C. Coast," and urges both Ms. Shea and Mr. Campbell to protect migrating wild stocks from fish farms.

So far, the politicians have been able to ignore the ever-growing letter. But the new study can only ratchet up the pressure.

Now that people know it’s not just pink salmon, but Fraser River sockeye stocks that are at risk, one has to wonder how many more names will get added to that letter.

 

 

November 4, 2008
SCIENTIST AT WORK | ALEXANDRA MORTON
The New York Times/Science

Saving Wild Salmon, in Hopes of Saving the Orca

By CORNELIA DEAN

ECHO BAY, British Columbia — Growing up in Connecticut, Alexandra Hubbard did not want to be Joan of Arc. She wanted to be Jane Goodall. But instead of chimpanzees, her animals would turn out to be killer whales.

In 1984, 26 years old and armed only with a bachelor’s degree and enthusiasm for her task, she moved to the Broughton Archipelago, in the Queen Charlotte Strait of British Columbia, where the whales, or orcas, were abundant. She and her husband, Robin Morton, a Canadian filmmaker, lived on a 65-foot sailboat and followed the orcas in an inflatable boat with a shelter in the back, stocked with Legos and books for their son, Jarret.

She came to know the archipelago’s long-lived orca clans and the matriarchs who led them. She knew she would find them in Fife Sound at the ebb tide, or moving up Johnson Strait with the incoming tide. Using a hydrophone, an underwater microphone she hung from the boat, she recorded their vocalizations and began to recognize what she called the dialects of the clans.

Her husband drowned in 1986, when Jarret was 4, but Ms. Morton stayed on, supporting her work by writing articles and books, designing T-shirts and working as a deckhand on a fishing boat.

Today, she hardly uses her hydrophone. There’s no point, she says, "since my subject is so rare now." These days, when Ms. Morton noses her workboat away from her dock here, she is on a crusade, seeking not orcas, but evidence against the salmon farms she believes drove most of the killer whales away, in part by infecting the wild salmon the whales eat with parasites called sea lice. Her work is a challenge to the salmon farm industry and to the Canadian and British Columbia officials who regulate it.

Once dismissed as an outsider and amateur, Ms. Morton has gradually gained the respect of fisheries experts like Ray Hilborn, a researcher at the University of Washington. "She doesn’t come from a science background but she has had a lot of influence in highlighting the issue," he said. Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia, calls her "a spunky hero."

That may be because she takes the issue personally. The disappearance of the orcas in the Broughton "ruined my life, absolutely," Ms. Morton said one day recently as she headed off to net baby salmon and check them for sea lice. "A lot of people have lost stuff they set out to do but, yeah, it ruined my whole plan."

According to the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association, salmon farms produce $450 million worth of Atlantic salmon a year in British Columbia. At any given time, 70 to 80 farm sites operate in provincial waters, perhaps 15 or so in the Broughton, a hardly inhabited area across Queen Charlotte Strait from the north end of Vancouver Island. Typically, each installation has a collection of net pens, usually crossed by metal walkways, floating in a cove or bay. Individual sites typically contain 500,000 to 750,000 penned fish.

As tiny young wild salmon, smolts, pass by these pens on their way to sea, they can pick up so many lice they die, Ms. Morton and other researchers have reported.

Farm operators like Marine Harvest, a Norwegian concern that is a major presence in salmon farming here, concede that penned fish are vulnerable to microbes and parasites but say drugs and pesticides minimize the problem, virtually eliminating the risk to wild fish stocks.

For example, Kelly Osborne, who manages farm sites in the Broughton for Marine Harvest, said penned fish were treated with an antilouse drug called Slice as smolts began their migration to the ocean. The drug is so effective, he said, that perhaps only 1 in 10 penned fish would have a live louse.

Government officials say it would be premature to blame the farms for declines in salmon runs seen here recently, because those numbers fluctuate naturally.

But Ms. Morton and researchers like Martin Krkosek of the University of Alberta and John Volpe of the University of Victoria predict that some local salmon runs will disappear unless the farms are altered or removed. And because salmon loom large in the diets of orcas, bears, eagles and other animals, their disappearance would unravel the region’s web of life.

"A lot of wild salmon populations have been on the edge for quite a long time," threatened by logging, dams and "plain old overfishing," said Ellen Pikitch, a fisheries biologist who heads the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University in New York. "The sea lice problem could be the nail in the coffin for some of these fish."

(Dr. Pikitch also pointed out what some scientists say is an even bigger problem with salmon farms. It takes more than one pound of fish, processed into pellets, to produce one pound of salmon. Even though farms are working to bring the ration down — some say they have achieved a one-to-one ratio — Dr. Pikitch said the growing need to feed farmed salmon had greatly increased the demand for anchovies, herring and other fish, and "aquaculture is indirectly pulling the rug out from under the ocean ecosystem.")

When Ms. Morton arrived at the Broughton, she was a graceful young woman with dark hair that flowed halfway down her back. "I thought she was another crazy hippie," Billy Proctor, locally acknowledged as the Broughton’s master fisherman, said in an interview.

She still moves gracefully but her flowing hair is gray now. And she long ago won Mr. Proctor’s admiration for her devotion to the Broughton and its wildlife. When her husband died, Mr. Proctor took Ms. Morton on as a deckhand. They collaborated on a book, "Heart of the Raincoast" (Touchwood Editions, 1998), an account of his life and changing times.

Today, when Mr. Proctor and other fishermen find escaped Atlantic salmon in their nets, they often bring them to her. She cuts them open and records, among other things, whether they have been fed the chemicals that farms add to feed to color their grayish flesh a more appealing pink. Then she disposes of the bodies, usually by dumping them in the water for crabs and other scavengers to eat.

Meanwhile, in what she calls "partnered science," she works regularly with experts from several universities. Typically, they design a research plan and Ms. Morton organizes the collection of field samples and other data to help carry it out.

At first, Ms. Morton reported her observations "naively," Dr. Pauly recalled. "It was simply ‘Hey, look at this, wild salmon are riddled with parasites.’ " Her opponents attacked her as inadequately credentialed, he said. In the years since, papers Ms. Morton has helped write have appeared in major scientific journals like Science, which in December published a study in which she and her coauthors link fish farms to precipitous declines of pink salmon in the Broughton. Scientists at the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria are sending graduate students to the Salmon Coast Research Station she established here at

Echo Bay, a community of a few families that clings to rocky crags that plunge, beachless, straight down into cold, clear water. There is so little flat land that many people live in float houses — cabins built on rafts or "floats" of foot-thick logs lashed to the shore. There are no roads, no cars and no shops except the few shelves of staples in the post office in Simoom Sound, around a wooded promontory from Ms. Morton’s home, where mail arrives once a week.

The research station occupies a shedlike building on a float. The graduate students and other researchers live in a cluster of houses, their wooden walls untouched by paper or paint, perched on the rock slope inland. One is a former float house that Mr. Proctor lived in as a boy and which Ms. Morton and her son occupied after Mr. Proctor and other neighbors hauled it up onto the rocks, a disaster-filled episode she recounts in her autobiography, "Listening to Whales" (Ballantine Books, 2002). Jarret, who graduated from the University of British Columbia, works as an engineer in Utah now, Ms. Morton said.

Another is a house she built with Eric Nelson, whom she met several years after her husband died and who is the father of her 12-year-old daughter, Clio. Still another is a house she built herself, she said, when it was clear the couple would split up.

The station is supported in part by Sarah Haney, a retired nurse and environmental campaigner from Ontario whose philanthropic resources come from the game Trivial Pursuit — her former husband was one of its inventors and she was an early partner in the venture. One of her major interests is whales, Ms. Haney said in a telephone interview, so she learned about Ms. Morton and her work. When the compound came up for sale, Ms. Haney bought it and paid "a lot of money" for improvements including a new dock, and a laboratory building.

This summer, she deeded the whole place over to Ms. Morton. "This is one of the most important philanthropic ventures I have ever been involved with," she said.

When Ms. Morton first came to British Columbia, she did not have a traditional academic background. She was a prep school dropout (Milton Academy in Massachusetts) who had worked in California for John Lilly, an eccentric researcher who studied dolphin communication. By then, she had taken enough college courses to earn a bachelor’s degree, she said. She first encountered orcas at Marineland, and decided she had to see them in the wild. She had thoughts of returning to school for a doctorate. Instead, she said, "I met Robin and just fell so crazy in love with him that before I really thought about it I just totally jumped tracks."

Ms. Morton acknowledges that "the three Ws: widow, whales, wilderness" draw a lot of attention to her work. She embraces it. "The problem with this whole issue is if nobody sees it nothing happens," she said one day recently as she motored past one of the farming operations. And because most of the fish farmed here end up in trucks heading down I-5 to California, she said, "it can’t just be the Canadian public. It has to be the American public."

So just as Jane Goodall speaks for chimps, Ms. Morton said, she wants to tell the world about the troubles afflicting the orcas, not as a crusader, but as "a woman cleaning house."

In September, after decades off the grid, Ms. Morton moved to a small town on Malcolm Island, in the Queen Charlotte Strait, where she will stay until Clio finishes high school.

She will live in a house on the water, a fixer-upper, she called it, and she will visit the research station by boat. Because she won’t have to chop wood or perform other Echo Bay chores, she’ll have time for projects like studying statistics online. And she is looking forward to conversation. In a tiny community like Echo Bay, she said, encountering new people with something new to say is a real treat.

"Billy and I now have a bet," she said, referring to Mr. Proctor. "He says nobody ever comes back. But I have a research station here. My life is here."

Meanwhile, she will be putting her hydrophone in the water again, just in case.

---

straight.com
Feds’ veto fish-fry-rescue plan
By: Alexandra Morton
Saturday, April 5, 2008

In 2000, three million pink salmon entered the rivers of the Broughton Archipelago to spawn.

The next spring, millions of pink salmon fry poured into the ocean in a river of life.

That was the year a fishing lodge owner alerted me to the sea lice epidemic.

Ninety-eight percent of these young pink salmon were infected with sea lice around fish farms. And 99 percent of them failed to survive and return to spawn in 2002.

This unprecedented decline triggered the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council.

In absence of today’s politics, it suggested two options: get all the fish farms out of the Broughton; or just get them off the major juvenile-salmon migration route.

Option two was enacted in 2003. Sea lice declined, and we got a good return.

Problem solved? No. This was too big an inconvenience to the fish farmers.

Sea lice are a natural salmon parasite but fish farms break the laws of nature. Parasites flourish in feedlots.

The difference here is that there are no doors to close.

Currents sweep millions of larval lice out of the net pens.

The fish farms are too near the rivers, and so wild salmon too young to have protective coat of armored scales are dying in the millions from farm lice.

>From 2001 to the present I have coauthored nine published scientific papers showing that there are always sea lice at fish farms; that it takes only one to kill young pink and chum salmon; and that if we don’t make any changes, it will take four years to wipe out Broughton Archipelago stocks.

I also found the same sea lice problem on sockeye and herring in northern Strait of Georgia.

For reasons that must be challenged Fisheries and Oceans Canada has adopted the policy that fish farms do no harm to our marine environment.

Nothing my colleagues from Canada’s major universities nor I can do will point them in the right direction.

Many Canadian scientists have seen this before as DFO (as Fisheries and Oceans has always been called) oversaw the destruction of the east coast cod.

When DFO adopts a policy, it rides it into the ground, destroying some of this earth’s most generous abundance.

So this year I decided if they won’t move the farm fish killing off our wild salmon, I would move our wild fish around the farms.

I launched adopt-a-fry.org with First Nation chief Bob Chamberlin and commercial fisherman John Dawson.

We applied to DFO to pick up the young salmon before the farms, carry them by boat past the lice, and put them back in the water a few kilometers down their migration route.

DFO does this all the time to get salmon fry out of hatcheries and around obstructions in rivers.

Donations poured in, and we were ready to go. Sea lice have started infecting this year’s generation of salmon, so time is of the essence.

Then yesterday, DFO hand-delivered a NO.

It said that instead of allowing us to save one of the last generations of salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, that it had a sudden interest in fixing the rivers.

Has DFO forgotten that just few short years ago, millions of pink salmon flowed from Broughton rivers, and still the lice ate them?

While some river work is a very good idea, the rivers are not the problem.

The Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council made this clear in 2002 when it came up with option one: take the farms out of the Broughton Archipelago.

This is very similar to the May 16 2007 recommendations by the special legislative committee to move all B.C. fish farming into closed tanks by 2012.

DFO is paid by us to protect our fish and it refuses.

The Norwegian corporations Marine Harvest and Cermaq are getting far more consideration than we are.

Wild salmon feed our forests that reduce our carbon footprint; salmon fuel the $1.6-billion wilderness tourism.

Every country in the world would love to have a fish this generous, but not B.C.

Here we feed them to corporate lice.

I have a tough choice now. I can rescue thousands of wild salmon or I can just watch them die.

What would you do?

Alexandra Morton is a member of the Raincoast Research Society and a founding member of Adopt-a-fry.org.

 

 

 The Tyee.ca

Feds Nix Rescue Plan to Scoop, Move Salmon - Researcher Alexandra Morton may try it anyway.
By Christopher Pollon
Sunday, April 6, 2008

The federal government rejected an application Friday by biologist Alexandra Morton to evacuate wild salmon out of the path of Broughton Archipelago fish farms, putting the outspoken researcher in a precarious position: risk a $100,000 fine, or let migrating juvenile pink and chum salmon run a gauntlet of farms she says will ensure their destruction.

Morton had applied to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) for a licence to transport salmon as part of her widely publicized plan to ferry young Ahta River pink and chum salmon past two fish farms operating in their migration path.

"I must advise you that the department does not support your proposal to capture and transport Ahta River juveniles past the fish farms in the area," wrote Paul Sprout, Regional Director for DFO’s Pacific Region in a prepared statement. "…the department believes that the capture, transport and release of these fish has the potential to do more harm than good."

But even before Morton had read these words, she was already considering breaking the law if the decision did not go her way.

"It’s difficult to communicate the feeling of watching these fish be destroyed year after year," she told The Tyee on April 2. "I know that down the line, I will want to know I’ve done everything I can to save these fish. I really don’t want to do this without a permit, but yes, I am willing."

The death of the Meetup

Ask Morton why she is willing to face such penalties — including an additional $100,000 and up to a year in jail for each subsequent offence — and talk inevitably turns to the death of the Meetup River last year.

The Meetup appears on most maps as the Viner River, a chum salmon stream that snakes across Gilford Island in the heart of the Broughton Archipelago, a cluster of islands set against the B.C. mainland east of Queen Charlotte Sound, not far from Port McNeill.

"I’ve been following the Viner chum since 2001, and every year they emerge from the river and swim straight into the path of this fish farm just west of the Burdwood Islands," she says. "They get infected with sea lice from the fish farm and die."

Viner chum have always run a precarious gauntlet on their path to the sea. In a run that once numbered 70,000 fish, they historically migrated into the waiting nets of the Alert Bay seine fleet at the mouth of the river, or were chased down by G-clan — a pod of northern resident killer whales that returned to Viner Sound each spring to feast.

But the seiners and the killer whales are gone. Last fall, when just 89 chum spawners returned to the Viner, Morton officially declared this once-great salmon river dead. But with that pronouncement came a desperate plan to scoop up tiny salmon fry as they emerged from a nearby salmon river in the spring of 2008, transporting them beyond the fish farms.

"I’ve focused on [moving fry from] the Ahta River only right now, because I love that river, but all of the rivers here need this," she says of her medevac plan. "My hope was that if I could concentrate on just one river, DFO just might let me start doing this."

But with today’s announcement, DFO will not allow her to move forward legally, making an already complex plan that much more complicated.

First plan to medevac fry

Morton originally planned to capture salmon as they emerged into the open ocean from the Ahta River using a 125-foot beach seine; one end of the net would be tied to the shore, and a speedboat would rive in a large circle to release the net. The net would be drawn increasingly smaller until a small pool remained full of baby fish. She planned to move them by bucket into a boat equipped with a water tank designed to continually refresh with fresh ocean water.

She had already identified an area to release the fry where the salinity of the water is very similar to that at the mouth of their natal Ahta River. Before the release, she planned to hold them in a pen to assess if any have been killed or injured, in order to alter the methodology or abandon the venture all together.

"One thing I had been discussing with DFO [in advance of the decision], is that it’s probably not wise to take them all [from the river], just in case something I do is a problem. I want to work it out with them to take half or less. And I’ll leave the others so I can study them as they go past the fish farms, so we’ll know what happened to them too."

Desperate times, desperate measures

There are about 30 leases and at least 20 active fish farms across the Broughton Archipelago, most of which are situated on the migratory path of wild salmon as they emerge from their natal rivers each April and May into the ocean. Once in marine waters, they will hold for up to several weeks to grow, feed and adapt to the salt water.

It is during this time that fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago harbour the largest numbers of sea lice. Although these lice occur naturally on wild salmon, the concentration of up to 700,000 adult salmon on a farm can create an unnatural breeding ground. Morton says the juvenile wild fish that must migrate past such farms would never be otherwise exposed to such numbers of lice and are unable to survive the exposure of a single louse.

Morton’s desperate response to sea lice is in part based on her own research, including a December 2007 study she co-authored in the journal Science, which concluded that pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago could face imminent extinction.

"The louse-induced mortality of pink salmon is commonly over 80 per cent and exceeds previous fishing mortality," concludes the peer-reviewed study. "If outbreaks continue, then local extinction is certain, and a 99 per cent collapse in pink salmon population abundance is expected in four salmon generations."

The province has considered sea lice a serious problem in the Broughton Archipelago since at least February 2003, when Agriculture Minister Stan Hagen announced that all B.C. fish farms had to monitor and treat sea lice, in response to the drastic declines in wild pink salmon that historically spawned throughout this area.

Marine Harvest, the largest aquaculture company in the world and largest farmer in the Broughton, has at least 10 farms in the area. They dispute the findings of the Science paper, and have published advertisements in Vancouver Island papers beginning April 3 that they show sea lice is not a problem for wild salmon in the Broughton Archipelago.

"When you’ve been so brash as to claim extinction in four years, one becomes desperate to manipulate the situation," says Marine Harvest Canada spokesman Ian Roberts of Morton’s medevac plan. He added that that the Science paper has been discredited by "20 leading scientists," although The Tyee has confirmed that no peer-reviewed science has appeared to refute this study to date.

Whacking sea lice with Slice

In February of 2008, Morton and a diverse coalition of First Nations, commercial fishermen, eco-tourism operators and environmentalists met with Agriculture and Lands Minister Pat Bell to request a provincial strategy of fallowing or emptying fish farms in the path of migrating fry salmon.

Minister Bell responded during the first week of March with a call for increased chemical treatments of lice-bearing farmed salmon, including a louse biocide known as Slice, which has recently emerged as the sea lice treatment of choice in B.C. waters.

Slice is controversial because it is not an officially approved drug for application for pest control; fish farmers must apply for an emergency application permit from government veterinarians. Environment Canada has historically voiced concerns over the "unknown fate" of Slice in the ocean — where it is deposited on the sea floor as a component of farmed salmon feces or in unconsumed feed. The federal government has also warned that sea lice can develop resistance to the drug over time.

Marine Harvest says it has been harvesting fish farms in time for the spring wild salmon migration, and that it uses Slice very conservatively in the Broughton. On March 31, Marine Harvest announced it had completed its 2008 sea lice control program, harvesting at least four farms and applying Slice to the rest.

Alexandra Morton concedes that Slice treatments have reduced sea lice on the wild salmon she observes, but not enough to spare the pink fry that often measure an average three centimetres and cannot withstand the attack of a single louse.

She also disputes Marine Harvest’s statistics about low average sea lice abundance as misleading, because the farmers only measure the number of lice found on adult fish inside the pens, and do not consider sea lice spread and reproduction in the adjacent marine environment.

"If there are 600,000 farm fish at a site and 75 per cent of them have sea lice, then that’s 450,000 lice. If every female louse has 250 babies every two weeks, that’s about 56 million lice larvae coming from that single farm every two weeks. And that spells serious trouble for migrating juvenile wild salmon, unless something else can be done."

Related Tyee stories:

    * A Fish Farm Critic Vindicated
      New research bolsters Morton’s claims of sea lice devastation.

    * Ministry Fish Farm Biologists Won’t Be Penned
      None joined expert body Libs created for ‘public interest.’

    * Push North for Fish Farms Blocked
      Gitxsan Nation thwarts planned ‘critical mass’ of farms. A Tyee Special Report.

Christopher Pollon is a Vancouver-based journalist. His website is www.chrispollon.ca <http://www.chrispollon.ca> .
 

 

FOR THE last four years in March and April, millions of pink salmon fry have left the rivers in the Broughton Peninsula and swum past the many fish farms, picking up a lethal dose of sea lice.
Cariboo Press
Wed 05 Mar 2008
Page: 0004
Section: Terrace Standard - Opinion

FOR THE last four years in March and April, millions of pink salmon fry have left the rivers in the Broughton Peninsula and swum past the many fish farms, picking up a lethal dose of sea lice.

Sick of waiting for the provincial government to order the removal of these floating net pens during the salmon fry’s migration, researcher Alexandra Morton and other concerned environmentalists have proposed a desperate solution: ferry them past the sea-lice infested farms in boats.

"I know where the Ahta fry coalesce, I know where surface currents move, I know how to catch and transport salmon fry, I know where it is safe to place them…this can save a lot of fish. I realize it is not a great idea, but it will save fish and after years of watching them die while people talk, I want to see some fish survive," Morton said.

Four years ago, Dr. Paddy Gargan, Head of the Central Irish Fisheries Board, linked serious declines in sea trout and salmon populations in Ireland to nearby fish farms: "These data demonstrate that the practice of whole-bay spring fallowing of marine salmon farms has a positive effect on sea trout finnock marine survival in fisheries within such bays. The data also strongly supports the view that the sea trout stock collapse on Ireland’s west coast was contributed to by sea lice infestation from marine salmon farms."

Fallowing works. When Broughton fish farms in the migration routes were fallowed in 2002, the returns of adult pink salmon were near normal. The provincial government continues to ignore calls to repeat this successful strategy. If you support Morton’s plans to save the pink salmon of the Broughton, visit the website ( HYPERLINK "http://www.adopt-a-fry.com" <http://www.adopt-a-fry.com>  \t "_blank" http://www.adopt-a-fry.org) which asks people to á" <http://www.adopt-a-fry.org)whichaskspeopleto&aacute;> adopt a small fry" for $20.

Even Mr. John Frederiksen, the major shareholder of Marine Harvest and an avid Atlantic salmon angler, himself declared that "I am concerned about the future for wild salmon. Fish farming should not be allowed in fjords with salmon rivers…The fish farming industry should be allowed to operate in fjords, but not where wild salmon are present in local rivers."

Using Department of Fisheries data, Canadian researchers Alexandra Morton and Dr. Marty Krkosek recently released a peer-reviewed report in Science predicting that unless fish farms in the Broughton were fallowed as they had been in 2002, the pink salmon runs would disappear in four years. Predictably, they were once again personally vilified by industry as being biased, and their results were dismissed as unreliable.

Sadly, the industry-dominated Pacific Salmon Forum is sending out contradictory messages about whether it accepts their findings. The PSF plans to fund more research while Broughton salmon once again suffer the ravages of sea lice infestations from farms in their migration routes.

Another report, from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, concluded that native Atlantic salmon populations have been severely reduced wherever fish farms exist. The researchers used official government data from Canada, Scotland, and Ireland, to compare the survival of wild salmon and sea trout in regions with salmon farms to adjacent, farm-free areas. "The overall trend, over and over again around the world, is that salmon farming seems to have a negative impact on wild salmon," according to researcher Jennifer Ford. "The mortality from farming that we find is really large in many cases–more than 50 percent reductions every year. That is not sustainable for any populations."

How many more scientific reports will it take to convince Premier Campbell to make the decisions that are essential to protecting wild B.C. salmon?

Enough delay, enough denial, enough research. This government must support the recommendations of the Sustainable Aquaculture Committee’s report: fallow the Broughton farms immediately to provide a lice-free passage for the wild salmon fry this spring, move existing farms to closed containment, and declare Northern coastal waters off-limits.

Andrew Williams is a high school teacher in Terrace and the chair of the Friends of Wild Salmon, a group that lobbies for measures to safeguard the wild salmon of the Skeena River.

No time to waste to protect fish