The politics of wild and farmed salmon: a brief update on the mess in British Columbia
The Osprey, Issue 58, September 2007
Craig Orr, Ph.D., Watershed Watch Salmon Society, Coquitlam, BC
Regular readers of the Osprey know that wild salmon face many threats. And judging by past articles, many Osprey supporters spend inordinate amounts of time reacting to one threat after another. While all this reacting is tiring—and too infrequently leads to lasting and positive change—it does provide valuable perspective on the depths of those threats. When it comes to the politics of mixing wild and farmed salmon, I would need several Ospreys to fully describe the mess we currently wallow in here in British Columbia.
We’re not talking minor-league teenage or office mess, either. We’re talking adult mess with all the trimmings: science trumped by myopic ideology and communications spin; a calculated campaign to maintain the status quo using smothering uncertainty and massive fortifications of denial; the failure to learn and apply lessons; personal attacks and dirty tricks; and change so stupefyingly glacial, it sets new standards for betrayal of public and ecological values.
All this Mess is firmly rooted in the recent and massive expansion of salmon aquaculture in the world’s coastal waters—waters also still harboring a priceless-but-fragile legacy of wild salmon. Some 1,323,000 tonnes of farmed salmon (2005 figures) are now grown annually in the world, including a ‘modest’ 67,000 tonnes in the coastal waters of British Columbia. Numbers of farmed Atlantic salmon in Norway now outnumber wild Atlantics by 100:1.
In the past decade, resource scientists and managers have also learned that the millions of farmed salmon now residing year-round in the world’s coastal waters, often in concentrations approaching one million fish in a single bay, are effective hosts for diseases and parasites. The biological amplification of sea lice in particular has triggered one of the greatest resource management challenges—ever.
Farmed salmon now produce 78-97% of all parasitic sea lice (mainly Lepeophtheirus salmonis) in marine waters of Scotland, Ireland, and Norway. Most troubling, lice on farmed salmon lay lots of eggs during late winter and early spring—just before uninfected wild juvenile salmon pass farms. Norwegian researcher Peter Heuch calculated that the nearly 100 million salmon in Norway’s 800 or so farms collectively produced an estimated 1.45 billion lice eggs during one 2-month spring migration period. Since these findings became public, Norway has valiantly tried to reduce spring levels of lice to protect wild salmon. British Columbia, on the other hand, remains mired in denial and inaction.
Please allow me to pause to ensure we’re clear on some vital points. First, scientists and layman alike know that lice are common on adult salmon. Most of us also know or suspect that a few lice don’t cause a lot of harm to an adult salmon. We also know that, historically, juvenile salmon entering the sea didn’t encounter many lice-bearing wild salmon, most of which normally return in the fall. Now they encounter thousands, and until the recent advent of salmon farming, we rarely saw infections of lice on juvenile fish—or suspected what those infections might do to whole populations.
Today, we regularly witness extensive outbreaks of lice on seaward migrating juvenile salmon (see Orr 2007 for a list of locations). These outbreaks are not ‘natural’. They coincide with the expansion of salmon farming—worldwide. No such outbreaks had been reported on juvenile salmon in the northwest Pacific until 2001, until after the expansion of farming. Every spring since 2001, 36 to 98% of all juvenile pink salmon have been infected with lice (often many per individual) in the heavily farmed area of BC known as the Broughton Archipelago.
Instead of focusing on the obvious links, or responding proactively, a senior Fisheries and Oceans aquaculture manager greeted the 2001 outbreaks by assuring the public “that lice are common on salmon” and that the media reports were presenting “a biased picture.” No mention was made of the novelty of the outbreaks. No apparent learning was gleaned from the European Union experience. Instead, these words marked the first salvo in a protracted and still-unresolved battle over the impacts of farm-source lice on BC’s wild salmon.
Not that we should be surprised by any of this. Only a few short years earlier, three Canadian academics reviewed the collapse of one of the greatest biomasses in marine history: the Atlantic cod. Their published paper, disturbingly entitled, “Is scientific research incompatible with government information control?” concluded that “nonscience influences can interfere [destructively] with the dissemination of scientific information and the conduct of science in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.”
Those non-science influences are also extremely prominent in the promotion of aquaculture in Canada, where aquaculture has been a development priority since the 1995 Federal Aquaculture Development Strategy. The policy was supported by an initial $75 million subsidy for research and development, and by additional commitments from the province of BC. Wild fisheries were in decline and aquaculture seemed the ideal substitute for ailing coastal communities.
But a monkey wrench was pitched into the support gears when lice outbreaks became regular media fodder in 2001, all thanks to Alexandra Morton, a persistent and passionate researcher who, happily for us, just happened to prefer living in out-of-the-way places. Since 2001, Morton has been at the epicenter of both the political and scientific battle over the impacts of sea lice. A cetacean researcher and long-time resident in the heavily farmed Broughton Archipelago, Morton’s life and career were forever altered that spring 3 day in 2001 when tourism operator Chris Bennett brought her dead juvenile pink salmon bearing parasites neither had seen on juvenile salmon.
Alarmed and needing answers, Morton turned to a Norwegian sea lice researcher whose first question was, “Do you have salmon farms in the area?” When Morton said yes, she was advised that the situation was much too political, so avoid getting involved.
But the Broughton was where Alex lives. For her this breathtakingly beautiful and productive place was much more than just a convenient locale to make money by growing lots of non-native salmon. (Aquaculture in BC began with native Chinook and coho salmon, but has since switched almost exclusively to easier to grow and more profitable Atlantic salmon.) Morton began systematically collecting juvenile salmon at measured distances from active farms, and honed the rigor of her analyses by teaming up with statistical ecologist Rick Routledge. Their published paper, the first of many, showed sea lice were nine times more abundant on wild fish near farms than in areas distant from salmon farms, and that 90% of juvenile pink and chum salmon sampled near salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago were infected with more than 1.6 lice•g-1 host weight (a likely lethal load).
Based on what she found, Morton also predicted fewer returning adult pink salmon in 2002. And when only 147,000 adults showed—when 3.6 million had been expected—BC had a ‘situation’ on its hands ultimately amplified into a crisis through the media.
And if ever there was a perfect fish for manifesting such a crisis, it’s the lowly pink. Along with chum salmon, pinks emerge from the gravel of natal Pacific streams and immediately head to nearshore marine areas where they can feed and grow. Yet this strategy means they are exceptionally small (less than half a gram) and vulnerable to things like hard-to-miss lice epizootics. And because pinks return as spawning adults the following year—usually in their millions—one never has to wait long from outbreak to crisis.
Much has been published about how people deal with crises—especially, it seems, people with vested interests wishing to maintain comfortable status quo leanings. Denial is the usual response. Denial that a problem exists, of causes and culpability, that the problem is severe enough to prompt action (or personal or economic inconvenience), that we can do anything, anyway. These various forms of denial even have names such as existential, consequential, and fatalistic denial.
Reactions to crises and status quo threats—especially in resource extraction and management cases—can also be much more active, with the deliberate promotion of uncertainty the weapon of choice. Adaptive ecologists like the great Buzz Holling have spent careers examining how resource managers, politicians, bureaucrats and others “deliberately exploit the complexity of ecosystems” to foster uncertainty (e.g. on cause and effect) to (hopefully) maintain status quo practices and policies (Gunderson and Holling 2002). In these cases, the often plodding but effective weight of evidence approach that serves science well fails us all, particularly when those with power demand 4 absolute proof of connections and impacts, before any action (other than more studies) is deemed necessary.
This is the situation in which British Columbians currently find themselves ensnared, as vested interests wield uncertainty like some righteous claim against those who dare question the sustainability of open net-cage aquaculture. One day the details may make an interesting case study in what Gunderson and Holling call the ‘pathology of regional resource management and development.’ But right now, it’s all just too damned depressing.
Fisheries and Oceans’ initial response to the 2001 outbreak was to wait 10 weeks until sending an oversized seiner to sample surviving salmon. The five-page anonymous report (since removed from the web) makes no mention of the timing of the survey relative to reported outbreaks, of Morton’s findings, or of extensive EU observations. It was, however, accompanied by a media release saying that “despite the appearance of some lice…pink salmon appeared to be in good condition.” Hardly cutting edge science, but apparently adequate to obfuscate and delay.
Most of the science was left up to Morton and her academic and NGO colleagues. In a series of published papers they built on the EU literature linking farms and lice outbreaks on juvenile salmon. Up and coming stars such as Marty Krkosek mapped farm-source lice footprints, and the results didn’t sit well with fans of uncertainty and status quo. Infection pressures near farms were 73 times above background levels, and lice levels remained elevated 30 km ‘downstream’ of farms. In the meantime, BC’s NGOs and academics organized five international workshops in which EU scientists were forthright on describing interactions between wild and farmed salmon.
All in all, it has been a remarkable ride for what Holling and colleagues have identified as the “shifting” of the “burden of proof,” in which it has been largely left up to non-agency scientists to prove that massive lice outbreaks: 1) originate with farmed salmon, and 2) impact wild fish.
Though the weight of evidence continues to build, consensus and action remain elusive, a sad indictment for science and conservation. People such as Morton and Krkosek have become special targets for personal and ‘scientific’ attacks intended to generate doubt (
http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mkrkosek/Criticisms&Responses.htm). Morton has been unethically mocked for using dipnets “that only captured sick fish” (not so, say academics and peer reviewers), and was initially denied further collection permits. A ‘freedom of information request’ revealed a detailed Fisheries and Oceans’ sea lice communications plan which labeled some NGOs as ‘anti-aquaculture’ and which urged government spokespersons to focus messaging on the complexity of the situation and the need for more research.
Sometimes the attacks and obfuscation are more subtle. Watershed Watch published a professionally-researched report on lice and salmon that prompted an angling club to raise concerns with the provincial minister of agriculture. When I arrived at the meeting, 5 an assistant deputy minister was already busy handing out an official looking but suspiciously anonymous critique of the report.
Meanwhile, EU scientists continued to visit BC, where they: expressed amazement at the exceptionally large size of BC’s fish farms (700,000-plus fish) and extremely small size of our wild fish; gently chided us to get past the denial and on with solving our problems; and helped craft consensus statements that said the evidence linking lice to farms and declines in wild fish was unequivocal. Three of those visiting scientists also testified at a special legislative panel on aquaculture, reiterating these messages, presenting evidence that salmon farming leads to a 1% decline in the survival of wild fish per 1000 tonnes of farmed salmon, and sharing lessons on how EU countries reduce lice numbers and impacts through fallowing of farms, whole bay management, separation of age classes, and other techniques not consistently used in BC.
In the meantime, agency spokespersons told the same committee that much previous research was flawed, that more research was needed on the tentative links between farms and lice outbreaks on wild fish, and that the evidence of population level impacts was weak and not to be trusted. The agency media wonks also had a field day when lice were found on marine sticklebacks. Media releases proclaimed sticklebacks to be the likely source of lice infecting wild salmon. Lost in the hype (besides the scientific process, and public confidence) was the fact that marine sticklebacks have an armored skin which likely makes them poor lice hosts; to date, not a single gravid (egg-bearing) louse has been found on any.
Also lost—but only made more blatant through its omission—was the fact that agency personnel (both federal and provincial) were saying little about lice on farmed salmon. British Columbians knew next to nothing about how many lice were being produced on the area’s farmed salmon, in stark contrast to more open reporting requirements in EU countries (a difference made even more curious by the fact that several international industries operated in both Canada and the EU but under different rules).
Then in September 2004, following intense public scrutiny, Stolt Sea Farms—now Marine Harvest, the largest aquaculture company in the world—belatedly released data on numbers of lice on its Broughton fish. Though averaged by farm, the data appeared robust enough to offer us the first glimpse of farm-related louse production in the Pacific. Falling once again into the alluring burden of proof trap, Watershed Watch took on the task of analyzing the data which showed that 10-12 active farms in the Broughton were capable of producing billions of eggs and infectious larvae each year. These totals vastly outstripped any other potential source, and louse production peaked ominously in spring months, just prior to when wild juvenile salmon passed near these farms.
Even so, we still only knew (and still know) what was happening on a fraction of the 80 or so active farms on the coast. Available data were also limited by how they were reported (averaged), so the NGO community listened intently when Stolt Sea Farms approached us in 2004 requesting a parlay.
Some two dozen face-to-face meetings later, I can’t help but wonder just how much further ahead we are. While we did visit farms and systematically count lice, we still see strong production of lice in spring. No cohesive plan exists to assess and reduce impacts. Industry and government continue to be over-reliant on costly (environmental and economic) chemical controls that EU scientists tell us have begun to fail. And denial and obfuscation still regularly rear their stubborn maws, as witnessed in a recent letter to a national newspaper from a senior DFO official claiming certain published researchers were presenting “questionable extrapolations” and that “sea lice are an unlikely cause of [the] variability” we see in pink salmon escapements.
No mention that agencies spend megabucks searching (unsuccessfully) for alternate explanations. No mention that Canada’s own Auditor General regularly reports Fisheries and Oceans to be in a conflict of interest as “both a regulator and promoter” of aquaculture. And in the bizarre dance of wild-farmed fish interests, several respected academics helping coordinate government-funded sea lice research recently resigned— very publicly—when industry refused to share lice data. Just another day in the politics of farmed and wild salmon.
Fortunately for the environment and our sanity, there is some good news. Canada recently enacted a progressive wild salmon policy (WSP) that pledges to conserve salmon biodiversity, and even suggests ways to do so. Unfortunately, the impacts of lice—and some other impacts I have not touched on—rob the ecosystem of the very adaptive capacity the WSP pledges to conserve. The legislative committee report was also remarkably honest and progressive in its assessment of the damage and the need to transition the industry, though its recommendations don’t bind government. Thankfully, the public is increasingly savvy and concerned, and the importance of the public was never more evident than in the last provincial election, when voters turfed most coastal members of the provincial government who supported the expansion of salmon farming. Introducing farms to the Central and North coasts of British Columbia has also been fiercely and successfully (so far) resisted by a coalition of First Nations, conservationists, fishermen and others, mainly under the banner of the Friends of Wild Salmon. Thankfully, too, several foundations and individual donors have stepped in to help groups like Watershed Watch and the nine-member Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform push for sound science and sustainable choices.
Last but not least, the weight of evidence, that old plodder unable to react quickly enough to crisis, never rests in its quest to overrun the fortresses of denial and inaction. The only question that remains is: How many more wild salmon will be sacrificed, before we dig ourselves out of this mess?
Further reading
Gunderson, L.H. and C.S. Holling (eds.). 2002. Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Washington, DC: Island Press. 507 p.
Morton, A., R. Routledge and R. Williams. 2005. Temporal Patterns of Sea Louse Infestation on Wild Pacific Salmon in Relation to the Fallowing of Atlantic Salmon Farms. North American Journal of Fisheries Management 25: 811-821.
Orr, C. 2007. Estimated sea louse egg production from Marine Harvest Canada farmed Atlantic salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, British Columbia, 2003-2004. North American Journal of Fisheries Management 27, 187-197.
Routledge, R., Gallaugher, P. and Orr, C. 2007. Summit of Scientists on Aquaculture and the Protection of Wild Salmon. Speaking for the Salmon, Continuing Studies, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC.
http://www.watershed-watch.org/publications/files/Aquaculture2007_final.pdf.
