This is Her open letter to all boaters:

When salmon farming first came to my community of Echo Bay 20 years ago, I thought they would be good for Echo Bay, attracting new families, good for the wild salmon by reducing commercial fishing and good for me providing shelter in storms as I wandered the area in my small boat. But they were the storm.

Today salmon farms provide no employment or families to my community, and they are having serious impact on wild salmon here as they have everywhere. Furthermore they displaced the fish-eating families of orca that I came here to study (Morton and Symonds 2002).

The situation is simple, industrial scale farming belongs in a quarantine setting. No one today would allow wild migratory birds to alight among battery-reared chickens.  Avian flu would spread like wildfire. When animals are crowded and fed in an unnatural manner; bacteria, viruses and parasite populations explode. Farmers use drugs to suppress disease long enough to get their livestock to market. While there are many rising concerns about this type of farming, salmon farms are unique in their access to the natural environment.  Farm fish are held in net pens that allow free-flow of pathogens between wild and farm salmon.  Once inside the pen, disease flourishes because farm fish are stationary, crowded and genetically similar.  This is called disease amplification. Some scientists call salmon farms disease culturing facilities (Bakke and Harris 1998).

Nature is fastidious about disease with an arsenal of predators to remove contagious individuals. The wild salmon is a nomad, always moving into clean water.  In the fall adult salmon arrive inshore, most carrying a few sea lice.  These salmon and their lice all die freshwater. Nature has cleaned house and set the stage for the next generation!  Pink and chum salmon leave the rivers only about 3 cm long, weighing less than ½  a gram and have no protective scales.  Their purpose is to feed in sheltered marine waters and grow as fast as possible before the young Coho chinook come out in mid-May to gobble them up and grow as well. Pink salmon are vital to Chinook and Coho.

Today wild salmon pass lice to farm salmon and instead of dying those lice reproduce all winter so the young tender wild salmon are met by billions (Orr 2007) of young lice in the spring.  A salmon can handle about 1 louse per gram of body weight. At less than ½ a gram these fish cannot survive a single louse (Morton and Routledge 2005). In a paper I co-authored last year we found 95% of juvenile pink and chum salmon were killed by sea lice from salmon farms in the area of Watson Cove, Tribune Channel, near Echo Bay (Krkosek et al. 2006).

Pink and chum salmon are not the only wild salmon affected by sea lice. I also find heavily infected Coho.  Norway, Scotland, Ireland and Iceland are all working hard to protect wild salmon from farmed salmon. Iceland has outright banned salmon farms from 95% of their coast to protect their sport fishery on wild salmon. Norway is creating farm-free zones around important rivers. But somehow her in British Columbia the very same salmon farming companies refuse to accept that their sea lice are damaging wild salmon stocks.  Both the Federal and Provincial governments are following their lead and also deny impact is occurring (Sea Lice Science a World Apart www.raincoastresearch.org).

There are solutions. We need to adhere to the model in which wild salmon thrive and separate the enormous farms (up to 1 million fish per farm) from the young wild salmon.  While most countries dedicated to farming salmon do not have abundant wild salmon that is not the case in British Columbia.  If we want both, the farms will have to be effectively contained. This can be done (www.farmedanddangerous.org) but investment in the technology has been slow. As long as the provincial and federal government allow BC salmon farms to use the ocean as a flushing device many tons of fecal waste, parasites, bacteria and viruses will waft out of the farms daily. They say closed containment is too expensive but for whom as it stands now the public is paying the cost. Nature will separate farmed and wild salmon, it is underway, the only question is will we take control of this dynamic, put farmed salmon in closed containment and benefit from both?

If you have concerns about salmon farms, please write to the Fisheries and Oceans Director General Paul Sprout, and the Provincial Minister in charge of salmon farms, Pt Bell.  Any place on earth that still makes clean air, water and food as well as beauty must be defended for future generations.

Good cruising to you,

Alexandra Morton

Febuary 3, 2007 

 

UPDATE from Alexandra
March 2009

I just wanted to give you an update. On February 9th I won in BC Supreme Court. The fish "farms" were designated a "fishery" and the Provincial regulation of this industry was ruled unconstitutional. The decision was based on the premise that the ocean inside the pens is the same as outside, and therefore the schools of salmon in the pens are a group of fish like any other and a "fishery." Since there are no private fisheries in Canada they are a public fishery.

It is a little vague because there are 3 definitions of "fishery"

1 - the fish
2 - the act of fishing the fish
3 - the area where the fish and the fishing occur

The Justice gave the two levels of government 12 months figure out regulation and  30 days to appeal.

Two days ago Marine Harvest filed an intention to appeal, saying they disagreed with the court, that their fish are private property. In an interview published in the Vancouver Sun, the Province surprised us all, especially Marine Harvest, by saying they did not intend to appeal.  There is a day or two left for an appeal to be filed so we will see. The federal government and the other provinces can also join in this appeal. There is a provincial election in mid-May and in the last election, nearly every MLA that supported fish “farms” lost their seat, so this could be a factor in the Province’s decision to appeal or not.

On February 23rd I wrote the Federal Fisheries (DFO) to ask that in the interim year during transfer of regulations that three aspects of the Fisheries Act not covered by the Province be applied to this feedlot fishery in preparation. I requested that:

1 – observers be placed on the facilities during harvest to record by-catch as is often done in other fisheries where it is a concern. There are many reports of large numbers of herring and black cod in the pens.

2 – Turn the grow lights off as they are specifically prohibited by the fishery regulations and attract wild fish to and into the pens

3 – Licence the vessels owned by the industry that are packing fish like all other commercial vessels engaged in a fishery.

DFO did not answer me and so I asked fishermen to sign the letter with me. When I got 100 signatures I sent the letter again and still no answer. Since then I have asked anyone concerned with this issue to sign the letter and now have two thousand, six hundred signatures and more by the hour. Attached is the last copy I sent with just under 2000 signatures. I resend it every few days.
 
 http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cEkxX3p3MGFBbWNVVGNVU3lxQnBwQmc6MA..

I remain incredulous at how resistant government is to deal with this industry and their lack of attention has gotten us all into quite a mess and threatens one of the most valuable fisheries left on earth.

Alexandra Morton