Aquaculture improving?..The Fish Farm Thread

okay so you admit even with removing fish farms, we are unlikely to see any change in salmon returns.

pretty typical ENGO response from the anti industry, anti sports fishing, anti herring fishing, anti humans being in the wilderness PR team.

First create a crisis, then say why shutting down X industry will stop the crisis, Then when industry is removed, pivot to why its still a crisis and point to the next silver bullet industry needing to be removed.

got it
 
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sigh!...

If you go back and re-read post#2159 and likely numerous posts throughout numerous threads such as this one that you previously responded to WMY - you will find that is not one of my declarations. I believe you already know the answer to the question you posed above in post#2161.

But... for the benefit of other posters whom are interested in this debate and for their clarification & information;

1/ accurate escapement estimates are generated thru accurate stock assessment methods such as fish fences, DIDSON/ARIS camera systems and the like. Visual surveys are problematic and often inaccurate. Unfortunately, there are few, limited accurate installations like these coast-wide so accurate escapement enumeration is both spotty and unfortunately rare. W/o robust, accurate escapement data over a long annual and seasonal time series - and considering the large margins of error inherent in the existing stream walk estimates and often lack of intensive data in both farmed and non-farmed areas - it is currently difficult to detect cause and effect mechanisms and attribute any noticeable changes to the available escapement data. Data is particularly bad for steelhead and coho and pinks and chum. Hard to link cause and effect w/o accurate and reliable numbers.
2/ Since both the industry and especially DFO never did any before/after baseline work on things like sea lice levels before the industry arrived - it is difficult to state what changed after the farms arrived,
3/ W/O timely and publicly-available notifications of both parasite AND disease outbreaks - it is impossible to test effects on adjacent wild stocks, including disease-agent mortality and morbidity - which is the whole intent of hiding those data, IMHO.
4/ W/O actual environmental assessments with scoping - it is impossible to mitigate these open net-cage wild/cultured stock interactions - which is again whole intent of ignoring this process, IMHO - because of legal liability concerns not just from the industry - but also DFO and the DoJ.
5/ Both farm and non-farm impacts are cumulative and synergistic together; and often after major perturbations and impacts a lowered level of abundance is often reached where depensatory mechanisms kick in further lowering the numbers due to cascading and feedback effects. There are many potential & realized compounding and additive factors such as: introgression and decreases in genetic health; decreases in body sizes meaning associated decreases in egg numbers and nutrition; less spawners often meaning less nutrients in lotic and lentic systems after their death for phytoplankton nutrients and growth, which then reduces numbers of invertebrate and zooplankton food for juvies; smaller juvies being less capable of avoiding predation and competing with resident trout, etc., etc. to name but a few potential effects.
6/ Irrespective of #5 above - all proponents are supposed to be responsible for their own impacts irrespective of any other impacts, as described on my last post and many others. The remaining habitat and stock numbers are MORE important not less. No get out of jail free card.

Thanks for the opportunity to clarify.
 
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2/ Since both the industry and especially DFO never did any before/after baseline work on things like sea lice levels before the industry arrived - it is difficult to state what changed after the farms arrived,

I can rember back in mid/late 70's being young teenager sportfishing out of king coho (comox) with my dad, and cleaning fish at the table, when an old commercial fisherman comes over and says to me and dad, "now theres a healthy fish you got there!, look at all those sealice" no word of a lie

Would love to hear from some more old commercial fishers on here from the days before ff , what their thoughts were from those days and sea lice.
Not scientific but would be good 1st hand knowledge of yrs gone by
 
In areas that have currently FFs - very few if any had baseline work done on sea lice before the institution of their long term operations.

However, in non-FF areas in BC - there has been quite a bit of work done on both juvies & adults in BC from 2003 thru to today. Much of that juvenile work was done mid 2000s thru mid 2010s. And then there is the rest of the World, as well. Some generalities can be observed thru other jurisdictions and their similar issues with sea lice loading on wild stocks and some of their regulatory approaches to manage those levels.

The assumption is that non-farmed areas in BC represent what farmed areas today used to look like - but it isnt a perfect comparison, as expected. Salinity in particular is critical in comparing. In addition, some areas are more prone to be used for not only longer term juvenile rearing - such as Clayoquot for Ocean-type wild Chinook juvies, or the Broughtons and especially Discovery Islands for Fraser sockeye juvies but some areas are also more receiving/staging areas for returning adults with sea lice - as you noted SF. All of this is in reference to interactions with Leps verses Caligus spp lice.

Leps is the larger grey to often quite dark lice and found almost exclusively on salmon. Caligus is about half the size of Leps and often have a pinkish or opaque colour - and the egg strings on females are also often pinkish. Caligus can be found on almost any fish - but especially herring. Some think that may be the reason that herring loose their scales so easily - to get rid of the lice. These lice can also be found on sticklebacks as well- but NOT commonly all the stages thru to adults. If a parasite is to use a host successfully it has to reproduce. A few years back DFO tried to suggest that maybe the armoured marine sticklebacks might be the vector to give lice to juvie salmon in order to shift focus away from the all too obvious obvious FFs - but somehow failed to mention to the general public they could find few if any gravid female lice on those fish - maybe because of that armour. It was yet another embarrassing moment for DFO in the science field. Simon Jones was the booster for that unsupported and embarrassing narrative. Sticklebacks are instead "sinks" verses "sources" for sea lice - and likely help juvie salmon if the louse lands on them instead of salmon juvies.

In any event the metric to use is number of adult (motile) lice per gram of weight of host fish to determine critical lice loads. Adult salmon - as we all know on this forum - range from 4-7lbs for adult sockeye, and up to 14-50lbs for adult Chinook. Early outmigrating pink and chum and 1YO sockeye juvies are very tiny in comparison: averaging only like 0.5 -4 grams @ outmigration, and they stay long enuff (1-4 months) to grow into 10-20 grams before they leave the areas that also now contain FFs. There is some debate as to what those critical lice levels are for both mortality (death) and morbidity (sublethal effects) - but likely in the order of 0.75-1.5 lice/gram fish host weight, or less. Some researchers quote that only 0.1 - 0.2 louse/gram weight is the critical lice level to initiate mortality.

So a large 30lb Chinook would weigh 13kg or 13,000 grams and using the 0.1 threshold - could theoretically withstand 1300 lice if osmoregulatory function is not compromised by skin abrasion/loss. Whereas a 1 gram juvie would have 10 times the lethal louse loading with just 1 motile louse. Older 5 gram (~60mm FL) juvies could still not withstand a 1 motile louse load - and it isn't until that juvie grows much larger (~10-20g) after 1-3 months growth could it theoretically withstand 1 louse. And many juvies sampled in FF areas have much much more than these lethal levels. They are dead fish swimming.

And therein lies the problem w FFs and their impacts to outmigrating juvie salmon that has the potential to cause population-level impacts (interject: "duhh!"). The juvies get loaded beyond what they can endure too early. The placement of the FFs interrupts the normal migratory allopatry a period of spatial & temporal separation between adult and juvenile hosts. And this has been the experience w FFs World-wide. See:




 
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I’m a retired commercial salmon fisherman with experience trolling the Canadian west coast and inside waters from Dixon Entrance all the way down to Roberts Bank. I started commercial salmon fishing over fifty years ago and spent nine years deckhanding on seine boats and trollers before running and then buying my own boat. I took the first troller I owned for a shake down trip up Knight Inlet in 1980 before there were any fish farms in the Broughton. Once the fish farms went in there, commercial trolling in that area closed for good.
Of course, I was targetting adult salmon so can’t speak to the lice situation on outmigrating juveniles at that time.
My experience with lice on adult salmon is pink salmon have the most lice and sockeye the least lice on average. Coho, Chinook and chum fall somewhere in between. But I can honestly say that I never encountered an adult salmon that had a thousand lice attached. I sometimes counted lice on the pinks I was cleaning when I was bored and rarely counted more than one hundred.
I think what would be more revealing is if the current international high seas salmon research cruises (Beamish et al) included sea lice counts on the offshore salmon they catch and compare those numbers to the DNA results they take to determine point of origin.
 
1 more thing your sharing of your early observations triggered, SF. Sea lice have been grown in controlled conditions in the lab - and the quote on the time it takes sea lice to grow thru their lifecycle depends on water temps but is 8-9 weeks at 6°C, 6 weeks at 9°C and 4 weeks at 18°C, and after reaching adult stages - females have lived for up to 210 days in the lab:

All of this raises some interesting questions on your observations, namely:
* where do the returning adult salmon get their lice?
* Is it possible they get them from FFs before they leave the nearshore areas?
* How have FFs changed things?

Well, w/o FFs - areas of low salinity have increased mortality and decreased survival of the early life history stages of sea lice. But the sheer numbers of Atlantic salmon in pens that have lice and then contribute to elevated lice levels in the nearshore areas is substantial and may well offset that normal mortality - something DFO has not yet grappled with:

So it is possible that if juveniles received a sub-lethal load and survived they would take those lice with them on their swim. However, many species/stocks remain at sea from 1-2 years in a large open area swimming and the lice survive for only months in their life history not years - so not a likely source for the lice you saw SF. And this was also likely before FF arrived. And it takes some weeks for sea lice to reach adult stages and lice don't like low salinity waters - so altho possible - it is debatable if the salmon stayed long enuff in the nearshore to have gravid female adult lice when you caught them.

So where are those offshore lice transfer areas? Seamounts? It would have to be in an area where adults aggregate for some reason like feeding.

and to bring this conversation full circle - when juvie salmon are caught in and around FF areas with an assortment of early stages of lice - if we apply the temperature data to the sea lice developmental rates - we could determine ~when the juvies got that lice loading. And since we have pretty good ideas about travel rates would be able to track juvies back to watershed of origin - one could theoretically place an individual juvie to a time/place where they caught those lice thru it's migratory path down the inlets. After a few hundred juvies were sampled - one would have a solid statistical idea as to where these interactions are happening. They could even backtrack up the inlets and sample and prove these lifestage/infection/temp/time interactions - easily.

Ever wonder why DFO has never done this? I have - and I believe I know the answer. legal liabilities. They and the DoJ likely have already discussed this and ran away carefully not kicking that sleeping dog on the way out. Pretty sad how our FF regulators and protectors act - or not.
 
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and since DFO won't do the studies or refuses to release those data if they have (the more likely scenario) - these independent researchers did a similar sampling as I described above in Muchalet Inlet:



Locations-of-the-study-farms-grey-squares-F1-F5-and-the-sampling-sites-for-wild.jpg

Locations of the study farms (grey squares; F1–F5) and the sampling sites for wild out-migrating salmon (black circles; W1–W16) within the Muchalat Inlet, BC, Canada, between 2007 and 2016. The west of the inlet opens to the Pacific Ocean. The water surface map is a visual representation of the Gaussian kernel weights, as determined from the five farm locations. The kernel densities were calculated by simulating a point process to represent a kernel density with a 30 km bandwidth. The points were simulated with ‘splancs’ package, and the kernel density surface with ‘spatstat’ package in R version 3.3.2 (http://www.R-project.org), and the maps were generated with QGIS version 2.18.13 (http://www.qgis.org).​


This is why independent science is so critical. DFO Aquaculture REFUSES to do science that inconveniences the industry they protect. And they often have to partner with the industry to take advantage of some funding sources which changes the focus away from finding embarrassing results. DFO is untrustworthy IMHO - they are too compromised - as Cohen also noted.

And then the rather extensive PR industry attached to the ONC industry goes off and predictably attempts to de-legitimize any and all inconvenient findings by labeling all those opposed to the status quo as evil "activists".
 

As of yesterday, March 1st, factory fish farms must abide by rules requiring them to keep their parasite levels below three salmon lice per farmed fish. This rule was created by the federal government as an attempt to protect vulnerable juvenile salmon as they migrate past the farms and their harmful parasites. Although the three salmon lice rule is better than nothing, we don’t believe it’s good enough to protect wild fish. Nevertheless, in previous years, factory farms have flouted this rule and have faced no consequences.
Right now, parasites are out of control at MOWI’s Koskimo factory farm in Quatsino Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This farm has, on average, 16 parasites per farm fish. That’s five times the allowable limit. They obviously can’t control their parasites and are now endangering juvenile wild salmon during their outmigration. Tell your MP factory fish farms aren’t above the law and steep fines or removal should be enforced by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).
Cermaq’s Rant Point farm, also on Vancouver Island’s west coast, is also above the limit. As of March 1st, Cermaq has not reported the parasite levels on at least six other farms. I can’t help but wonder, are they hiding something?
Our MPs need to hear from us on this or nothing will happen, these farms will continue to spew parasites in the path of juvenile salmon. Can you send them a quick email?
We are exactly four months away from June 30th, when almost all factory farm licences expire. We know the industry is nervous about this upcoming deadline, we see their propaganda ramping up. These next few months will be pivotal in the fight to get factory fish farms off the B.C. coast and away from migrating wild salmon.

Our federal government promised to get factory fish farms out, and while they’ve taken some action, removing farms from the Discovery Islands, they’re not done yet. We need to keep reminding them to keep their promises and defend wild salmon from fish farms and their parasites and diseases.
Please take action and share this with your friends and family.
PS. Don’t forget to email your MP.
 





 
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This well-written letter summarizes many of my above points about the impacts of the ONP technology, and adds some more:

fraser.JPG
 
Id imagin to make that deadline that you would have to inform company's and put that in motion soon.

"Claire Teichman, press secretary for Canada Fisheries Minister Joyce Murray, told IntraFish the protection of wild Pacific salmon is a priority for British Columbians, and the minister plans to follow through with transitioning from netpen salmon farming in coastal British Columbia waters by 2025."
 
Thanks Dave for keeping everyone else on this thread current as to what the industry PR machine is doing to keep everyone from panicking and investors from fleeing. And as usual - when one actually checks out the court findings - it is not as presented (big surprise).

1st - to set the court case into context:

Cooke (yet again) pulled a bone head maneuver besides killing off lobsters on the East Coast and denying it but later getting caught and fined - in this case they didn't keep their net cages maintained in Washington State - and subsequently they had a big spill of PRv-infected farm stock that initially they instead blamed on the eclipse:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/cooke-aquaculture-washington-salmon-escape-1.4490171

https://www.timescolonist.com/busin...0-for-major-escape-of-atlantic-salmon-4658636

https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-019-1148-2

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesal...thousands-of-atlantic-salmon-escape-fish-farm

So after that - Washington State said that's it you're done farming Atlantics and passed a law that only allowed native species. Cooke restocked w triploid (sterile) steelhead and the WILD FISH CONSERVANCY took them to court. And the court was asked to rule on a very specific and narrow part of that law/permit:


courts1.png

courts2.png
Within that narrow court case - the court depended upon NOAA)'s biological opinion regarding marine finfish aquaculture in Puget Sound and whether they crossed the "T"s and dotted the "i"s in their requirements for STERILE STEELHEAD farming when analyzing the effects of EPA’s approval of Ecology’s Sediment Management Standards regarding marine finfish rearing facilities.

This was NOT a blanket "get otta jail free card" for all ONPA everywhere farming Atlantics - but that's what the industry PR machine would like everyone to believe. The industry is absolutely desperate to change the narrative. They are loosing $ and will loose more. That's their driver for the continual lies and empty reassurances to their investors.

Typical. Just read the documents. Don't trust PR firms and communication branches...
 
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A page from the NOAA biological opinion I am still reading thru:

Transfer of pathogens from an infected farm involve active and passive mechanisms. Good biosecurity measures can effectively manage active transfer mechanisms such as proper management of contaminated equipment and aquaculture vessel traffic frequency. Passive dispersal of pathogens from an infected farm is best managed by appropriate siting, and transfer kinetics depend on persistence of infectious pathogens outside of the host, particle transport features, and site-specific hydrodynamics. In an extensive assessment of risk presented by common pathogens of aquacultured Atlantic salmon in the Discovery Islands of British Columbia, Canada, a detailed Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) was applied to simulate passive particle tracking from farms to estimate dispersal trajectories (Chandler et al. 2017; Foreman et al. 2015a; Foreman et al. 2015b). This type of information can be used prospectively to inform appropriate farm siting. Hydrologic models can be coupled to an epidemiologic model to inform relative positions of farms. Salama and Murray (2011) demonstrated how pathogen transmission between farms could be affected by current flow, farm size (expressed in tons), and pathogen shed (either peak, ½ peak, or ¼ peak). For farms ranging in size from ~1,000 to 3,000 tons, separation between farms to avoid persistent outbreaks varied depending on the pathogen: 20-40 km for A. salmonicida, 10-20 km for ISAV and 100-200km for IPNV (the distance between the two Cooke farms - Orchard Rocks and Rich Passage, in PS is ~110 km.). The study also highlighted the importance of rate of decay of the pathogen. Although both ISAV and IPNV are very small viral particles, the slower decay rate of IPNV resulted in a ten-fold larger recommended distance. Although that study concluded that larger, widely separated farms were preferred to smaller, clustered farms, such modeling efforts are most appropriately conducted on a site-specific basis.

A similar model construction was used by Stucchi et al. (2011) to describe the transport and concentrations of sea lice (L. salmonis) in the Broughton Archipelago in British Columbia. The authors compared the results of their models to wild fish survey results and found that in areas where the model predicted low concentrations of infective sea lice stages, wild juvenile salmonids had a low prevalence of sea lice infection. If researchers are able to quantify and validate this correlation, they can then further develop regional disease management strategies for a pathogen where a vaccine does not exist.

A study by Mordecai et al. (2021) suggests the transmission of PRV-1 from farmed net pen fish (Atlantic salmon) to wild Pacific salmon in the northeast Pacific, but it is unclear if the farmed fish were initially infected or if they became infected after transfer to marine net pens. However, PRV has been present in northeast Pacific salmonids prior to the introduction of aquaculture to the region, with the earliest detection in wild steelhead in 1977 (Marty et al. 2015). Furthermore, none of the Pacific salmonids that were PRV-positive displayed any disease symptoms. A different diagnostic study of more than 2,200 Pacific salmonids detected PRV genetic material in four of the six species, although none of those fish displayed any disease symptoms (Purcell et al. 2017). An important caveat of results based on genetic detection is that pathogen presence does not necessarily indicate disease. In the case of PRV, which has not yet fulfilled Koch’s postulates as the etiological agent of disease in Pacific salmonids, the interpretation based solely on genetic detection should use caution.

Data from multiple locations world-wide strongly indicate that amplification of sea lice in salmon aquaculture has a negative effect on sympatric wild fish stocks, including population decline (Thorstad et al. 2015, Torrissen et al. 2013; Costello 2009). Although these conclusions are based primarily on correlations, the relationship is observed at multiple locations in the world and is associated with production cycles (e.g., Vollset et al. 2018). Because lice infestation is affected by temperature and salinity, farm siting criteria for salmonids should include considerations of both oceanographic and environmental conditions to reduce the potential for lice infestations (Brewer-Dalton et al. 2014). For example, sea lice survival and nauplii development is compromised at salinities below 29 and 25 parts per thousand, respectively (Bricknell et al. 2006; Johnson and Albright 1991), potentially explaining why sea lice are not problematic for Atlantic salmon net pens in PS. The negative effect of sea lice on the physiology and growth of cultured fish is a serious economic concern for aquaculture, and fish growers have a significant investment in minimizing and managing sea lice (Taranger et al. 2015). Programs for monitoring and controlling sea lice infestations, including integrated pest management (e.g., Brooks 2009), continue to be developed and tested worldwide (Torrissen et al. 2013).


Data from multiple locations world-wide strongly indicate that amplification of sea lice in salmon aquaculture has a negative effect on sympatric wild fish stocks, including population decline - not seeing the PR firms flag this finding...
 
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