The Martlet

Two years ago I was painfully ignorant of our ocean and all the miraculous life it supports. All I knew was that I wanted to work with fish. For my final biology co-op I decided to follow a professor’s advice to undertake a summer of research with his grad students on salmon.

I packed my bags and headed up to the Salmon Coast Field Station in the Broughton Archipelago to join the teams investigating various effects of net-pen salmon farming on wild salmon fry.

I had no concept of the political ecology I was getting myself in to.

Academic Paradise

Located at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, the Broughton Archipelago is a series of Kwakwaka’wakw territory islands that sits between the Island and the Mainland. Hundreds of small streams, larger rivers and protected coastal waters support a wide array of marine and terrestrial biodiversity throughout the region.

The Salmon Coast Field Station is located in Echo Bay, a small community nestled in the heart of the Broughton. Since it began as a research station in 2006 it functions entirely off the grid, balancing scientific research and sustainable living.

The station is directed by prominent biologist Alex Morton, who has lived in Echo Bay for over 25 years. She originally came to the Broughton to study killer whales, but her research focus shifted abruptly when she realized that the food source of orcas and other marine mammals (Pacific salmon, for example) were being affected by the open net-pens of the local salmon farms.

“At first I thought Salmon Farming was a good idea — good for my community,” Morton says, “But now I feel differently. My community is dying.”

The property supports large gardens, fruit trees, clean drinking water and the buildings are fueled by wood, generators and solar power. Graduate students and researchers from Simon Fraser University, University of Alberta, University of B.C. and UVic, as well as independent researchers, come together to collaborate on a variety of projects at the station.

As a student fascinated by ecology (and interested in having dinner with leading scientists), discussing relevant biology and eating food from our gardens was the education I craved after too much time on campus.

Wild salmon, meet farmed salmon

The Broughton supports populations of all six species of Pacific salmon: Pink, Chum, Coho, Sockeye, Chinook and Steelhead. Complex ecosystems and First Nations communities have depended on wild salmon there for tens of thousands of years, and only within the past 100 years has commercial fishing and logging damaged critical spawning/rearing habitats and population numbers.

In more recent years, wild salmon are experiencing intensified and complicating pressures from commercial and sport fishing, as well as from salmon farming.

Although fish stocks have declined drastically in the Broughton in recent years, commercial and recreational wild fishing industries provide an estimated 3,880 full-time jobs in the province: 14,300 jobs in total, according to B.C. Statistics. Today, there are roughly 27 salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago and 125 in total throughout south coast of B.C. The salmon farming industry in B.C. provides an estimated 1,500 full-time jobs.

Although aquaculture began on this coast as small operations, today three different Norwegian corporations own 90 per cent of salmon farms. Norway has dominated the aquaculture industry globally, with the majority of their farms in Norway, Scotland, Chile and Canada.

The report “Fishy Business: The Economics of Salmon Farming In B.C.” comments that, in the late 1980s, Norwegian aquaculture corporations were faced with stringent size restrictions and environmental regulations in their own country, so they decided to expand in countries where regulations were less managed (i.e. Canada and Chile). Aquaculture, until recently, was managed and regulated provincially in Canada.

According to Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), farmed salmon is B.C.’s largest agricultural export product, providing jobs and profit for coastal communities, exported mainly to the U.S.

If you thought head lice was bad, try sea lice

Unlike other species, Pink and Chum salmon fry leave their creeks as soon as they emerge from the gravel after hatching.

The three centimeter-long, scale-less fry enter the complex nursery grounds of the coastal ocean in the Broughton, where they spend months preparing to migrate out to the open ocean. Once the fry have grown scales and fostered enough flesh, they begin to leave the coastal waters to the ocean as smolts. It is at sea that they will spend the majority of their lifetime as adults before returning to spawn.

Sea lice are a naturally occurring parasite, existing at low densities in open ocean populations of adult salmon, as well as in other hosts in coastal waters.

In a natural ecosystem, fry experience manageable amounts of lice infection. Once they mature to smolt stage, the salmon migrate to the open ocean and can sustain a small population of lice without drastic survival threats.

Upon returning to their rivers in subsequent years to spawn, lice normally die in the freshwater, reducing the lice populations in coastal waters to those living on non-salmon hosts. This leaves the coastal waters empty of lice for the winter months. When the small Pink and Chum fry emerged from their rivers, the waters would usually be relatively un-infested.

“In Spring, the newly born salmon enter a sea washed clean by the tides all winter,” Morton explains.

Enter salmon farms. Morton begins to explain to me that each pen has roughly 600,000 to one million fish inside.

“These fish are grown for a year and half before harvested,” Morton says. “They become infected with sea lice as wild salmon swim past them.”

However, unlike wild salmon, farmed salmon have no means to control the population of lice.

“It is comparable to you having a 40-pound parasite chewing through your back,” says Dr. John P. Volpe, a professor and salmon researcher at UVic.

High-density populations of lice are sustained in farms throughout the year.

“Each female louse can produce 250 eggs with the ability to reproduce six times,” says Morton. “With an infection rate of one to two lice per farmed fish, the subsequent result is billions of lice larvae in the water surrounding the farms.”

Most farms in the Broughton are located along the migration routes of the wild salmon fry, resulting in high, unnatural levels of louse infection. Dr. Martin Krkosek, who completed his graduate work at Salmon Coast Field Station, has found up to a 95 per cent mortality rate in Pink salmon fry due to lice parasitism.

With the farms placed strategically on migratory routes of wild salmon, entire populations of Pink, Chum and Sockeye fry are running a gauntlet of survival against sea lice as they pass by these open pen farms.

“No one today would place a chicken farm amongst wild geese and ducks,” Morton says. “We know this spreads avian flu with severe consequences.”

The list goes on: dicey SLICE

In an attempt to manage problem of sea lice, salmon farms began using the pesticide, Emamectin Benzoate, marketed as SLICE. It is a neurotoxin to crustaceans that is fed to the salmon in food pellets and then enters the flesh.

The salmon flesh becomes toxic to sea lice when the lice attempt to attach themselves to the fish, and the populations drastically decrease. While it is believed that there are no known effects of SLICE on mammals, adverse effects on invertebrate crustaceans, such as lobsters and shrimp, are the concern.

SLICE is illegal for terrestrial use in Canada and banned entirely by the FDA in the U.S., but can be administered in Canadian marine waters for difficult cases of sea lice. The effects of SLICE on other crustaceans, such as the plankton that form the basis of the marine food chain or the crabs and prawns harvested commercially, are currently being studied on the west coast. Little is known, and what is known is hard to find out.

Sea lice and SLICE are not the only consequences of salmon farming in B.C. Diseases such as Infectious Salmon Anemia Virus (ISAV) are already rampant in salmon farms in Norway, Scotland, Ireland, eastern Canada and Chile.

Thousands of people in Chile have lost their jobs this past year to mass salmon mortality as a result of ISAV. Because the salmon farming corporations are global, hatchery eggs are shared between countries. It is probable that Canadian salmon farming is on the verge of a similar outbreak.

As a biology student, I can’t help but question the energy transfer involved in feeding all these farmed fish. Farming carnivorous salmon requires large inputs of other fish to constitute their diet. According to the Living Oceans Society, “it takes two to five kilos of wild fish processed into feed to produce one kilo of farmed salmon.”

So where is that fish coming from? The majority of a farmed salmon’s diet is taken from smolt fisheries in the coastal waters of South America or South East Asia. In my mind, those fish should provide food for coastal ecosystems and communities in those regions — not ours.

Shift in management tides and lice litigation

Fortunately, the provincial government and local management councils realized the gravity of the sea lice situation. In recent years, farms have been fallowed (temporarily emptied) or treated with SLICE to make way for migrating juvenile Pinks and Chums.

Norwegian company Marine Harvest, the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon, recognizes that our farmed salmon co-exist with wild fish.

“We take actions to protect wild fish species through the way we manage our operations, through research and through salmon enhancement,” states the company.

Despite the hope that chemical control for the parasite is limited, SLICE is a celebrated part of salmon farming management along our coast. I question an industry depending on the million-dollar administration of a potentially dangerous drug.

However, this fall has seen an incredible return of Pink salmon back to the parts of the Broughton where the drug was used, reflecting a wise management decision two years ago that allowed the fry to migrate in a relatively clean environment.

Previously, it was difficult to ask questions or inform policy makers involved in the wild and farmed salmon issue. Farmed salmon were managed provincially, but were affecting wild salmon, which are managed federally by DFO.

Last fall, Alex Morton took the Provincial Government to B.C. Supreme Court for unlawful management of salmon farming, as it was compromising a public resource — wild Pacific salmon. She argued that the law in Canada required a shift in management of aquaculture to the DFO, which oversees all fisheries nationwide. She won the case. Farmed salmon now constitute a public fishery, as they are within public waters and will be managed federally.

The DFO has a mandate to act within the best interests of our public resources, one of which is the wild salmon. The provincial and federal governments are currently transitioning the management of aquaculture.

In our backyard: wild vs. farmed politics

The decline of Pacific salmon is happening on our watch and under our nose.

Clearly, salmon farms are one part of the large and complex world that faces wild Pacific salmon. Farms can be a relatively simple piece of the puzzle to manage and regulate, so long as the companies and governments that oversee them are held accountable to the people and ecosystems being affected by their practices.

Alex Morton currently has 18,000 signatures on a letter to the Minister of Fisheries, Gail Shea, demanding that the DFO uphold their mandate to act in the best interests of wild salmon.

“History is clearly repeating itself,” she wrote to Shea. “In 1997, the DFO scientists reported that the collapse of Canada’s North Atlantic cod stocks … [occurred] because the DFO ignored the science, misinformed the public, offered plausible but inaccurate theories and reprimanded scientists who spoke freely and took no action. No one in the DFO was held accountable when Canadians lost this vast resource. Here in 2009, I would argue you and your department are ignoring the science, misinforming the public … and taking no action on a highly-documented and obvious factor that reoccurs worldwide wherever there are salmon farms.”

Currently, Shea and the DFO deny aquaculture to be a contributing factor in the disappearance of nine million sockeye from the Fraser river that were expected to return.

These Juvenile salmon migrate past 60 salmon farms before going to the open ocean. Many ecosystems and communities depend on the wild fish.

I continue to immerse myself in this issue, returning to Salmon Coast this past summer and engaging in political actions in Victoria. It may have been better to enter the controversial world of salmon research as an unknowing, un-invested prairie girl. My father is not a fisherman and my yearly food supply does not depend on sockeye openings. I do not operate an ecotourism lodge, nor do I depend on summer wages from working on a salmon farm to pay for school. I was just a kid on co-op term.

What is happening up there is not rocket science. High-density populations of salmon farms accumulate parasites and disease, and require massive amounts of other fish in order to feed them. When those fish live in open net-pens, along coastal migration routes of juvenile salmon, wild fish get infected with high rates of sea lice.

The entire ecology of the Broughton Archipelago suffers as a result.