Neil Frazer, a science professor at the University of Hawaii who has been carefully following the BC salmon farming issue for many years, was recently part of a delegation to Norway to meet with top management at Cermaq, the parent company for Mainstream Canada. Mainstream is the second largest salmon farm company operating in BC.
Open net-cage salmon farm, Photo: Lara Renehan
Frazer wrote a lengthy report on the trip and included an analysis of what is so off-base with our federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ scientists who can’t accept what their Norwegian counterparts readily take as their starting premise: that huge numbers of sea lice on salmon farms are having a negative impact on wild salmon runs.
He points out that most peer-reviewed studies looking at BC salmon show that farm-fostered sea lice are contributing to lice loads on wild juvenile salmon. Pink salmon fry are especially vulnerable because they enter the ocean weighing about a quarter of a gram and they do not have scales. In areas without salmon farms, infection rates of pink salmon fry are negligible compared to rates in areas with farms.
Despite the science being very clear, Frazer says that there is confusion in Canada because of a small group of scientists in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).
“Those scientists have an explicit duty to support government policy, and the current Minister of Fisheries and Oceans favours salmon farming,” he writes. “This is not a recipe for good science. Judging from their papers, this group lacks basic training in the population dynamics of host-parasite systems, and their intention is to mislead their readers. In plain English, their papers appear to have been written mainly for propaganda purposes.”
He says the DFO group has tried to discredit the disease transfer mechanism in three main ways:
- by promoting unlikely alternative sources of the sea lice on juvenile wild salmon:
- by attempting to show that lice don’t lower the life expectancy of their juvenile hosts: and
- by distracting the public from well-established population-level effects.
He goes on to explain what is wrong with the science that has been conducted by DFO researchers:
- One DFO scientist extensively trawled a large area of the BC coast in April and May, finding 35 wild salmon that could be overwintering hosts for sea lice, but ignored the millions of salmon with lice located in the same area on salmon farms.
- In another paper, the same scientist suggested that returning adult wild salmon are the source of the lice on the juvenile wild salmon, a proposition that could only make sense if the adult wild salmon returned several months earlier than they actually return.
- A second DFO scientist has worked very hard to create an impression that three-spine stickleback are the source of the lice on juvenile wild salmon and although sea lice were found on sticklebacks in the study, no spatial analysis was done to see if sea lice burdens were greater near farms than distant from farms.
- The DFO stickleback scientist also confused the life expectancy issue by doing laboratory experiments in which juvenile pink salmon were exposed to lice larvae but most of the lice fell off his fish and the infection time was very short compared to natural conditions.
Finally, Frazer leaves us with the thoughts of two eminent BC fish biologists: Dr. Larry Dill, a world-renowned Canadian ecologist, has described DFO’s Minister and senior bureaucrats thus:
“They are either extremely ignorant, misinformed, or they are lying to us.”
Dr. Daniel Pauly, easily the world’s most eminent fisheries scientist, agrees with Dr. Dill. As Dr. Dill noted in his testimony to the Parliament of Canada’s Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, the science supporting declines of wild salmon due to salmon farms is about as certain as science can ever be, and it is wrong for decision makers to delay or deny by seizing on the fact that nothing in science is ever 100 percent certain.
Scientists who have studied the situation, and are not compromised by being on the payroll of the salmon farming industry or a captive government agency, agree that farms must be removed from the migration routes of juvenile Pacific salmon in British Columbia if those salmon are to be preserved, Frazer concludes.
Tags: department of fisheries and oceans, farmed salmon, sea lice, wild salmon declines
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