Sea Shepherd ‘Pirates’ to Turn Spotlight on BC Salmon Farms
[ http://thetyee.ca/News/2016/07/19/Sea-S ... mon-Farms/ ]
Biologist Alexandra Morton welcomes conservation society’s support; fish farmers ‘alarmed.’
By Andrew Nikiforuk , July 19, 2016 | TheTyee.ca
Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about the energy industry for two decades and is a contributing editor to The Tyee. Find his previous stories here.
When Alexandra Morton learned that Paul Watson, the combative navigator of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, was sending a research vessel to British Columbia to help draw attention to the threat fish farms pose to wild salmon, the 59-year-old biologist was stunned.
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Salmon farming began on the West Coast 30 years ago as small family-run operations but quickly became a source of controversy due to algal blooms, price volatility, Atlantic salmon escapes, the killing of fish predators and bankruptcies.
Morton, a whale specialist, initially supported fish farms and even worked on one, until commercial fishermen raised concerns about the location of fish farms in critical habitat and on migration routes for prawns, salmon and rock cod.
After the DFO answered Morton’s persistent queries about impacts with letters stating “There is no evidence of problem,” the biologist realized the federal agency wasn’t collecting evidence on the impacts of factory farms.
She began to document how exploding sea lice populations at factory farms attack and cripple migrating young wild salmon. She also began to track and identify the impact of diseases spawned in salmon farms and transmitted to wild fish.
“I shouldn’t have to get on a Sea Shepherd vessel and make a scene when governments have a problem,” says Morton. But governments increasingly only heed corporate voices, she says.
In approving long-term leases to fish farms “with no consultation whatsoever, the federal Liberal government has failed act in good faith by not obtaining the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples,” adds Morton.
She hopes the presence of R/V Martin Sheen in coastal waters from Vancouver to Alert Bay will draw attention to a “failure of democracy.”
Just like cattle feedlots or intensive hog operations on land, industrialized farming of fish like salmon depends upon intensive use of fossil fuels and imported feed.
Crowding of fish also sets the stage for the rapid growth of viruses, bacteria and sea lice. Factory farms also produce high volumes of toxic waste (2.5 to 2.7 kilograms per fish per production cycle) [ http://0101.nccdn.net/1_5/1ee/0ae/200/W ... n-farm.pdf ] that can seriously degrade coastal water quality. [ http://www.farmedanddangerous.org/wp-co ... plumes.pdf ]
A waste plume from a fish farm, for example, can extend 30 kilometres into the ocean and can become a biological gauntlet of viruses, bacteria and sea lice for wild migrating fish.
“Four foreign corporations are using our wild Pacific migration routes as their open sewer to raise a foreign species of fish on the territory of First Nations,” said Morton. “It is not a sustainable industry.”
She compares the placement of fish farms on wild fish migration routes to a mother “dragging her children through the infectious disease ward of a hospital on their way to school.”
“And the Trudeau government is allowing them to get bigger,” Morton notes.
Morton and other groups such as the New Brunswick-based Atlantic Salmon Federation [ http://asf.ca/aquaculture-in-need-of-change.html ] have long advocated for closure of open net fish farms and a shift to land-based aquaculture industry using a closed system that can contain its dangerous biological waste.
Such a system could also use alternative feed supplies such as insects as opposed to dwindling and imperilled stocks of small fish.
Morton also says the government should use new technology that can read the immune systems of wild fish to help coastal communities restore wild salmon populations.
If genomic profiling shows that certain kind of pollutants, declining river water levels or deforestation are stressing fish along a particular migration route, “we can go back the next year and fix the problem and see it makes a difference to fish survival,” she says.
All coastal communities would have to participate in a monitoring program with standard protocols to make the system work, explains Morton. “The technology allows the fish to talk to us and then allows us to structurally get out of the way of fish so we don’t have be a bully in the ocean.”
The RV/Martin Sheen will follow wild salmon migration routes along the Fraser River delta up to Discovery Passage and Alert Bay over the next two months.
The BC Salmon Farmers Association said they are open to “meeting with the researchers from the Sea Shepherd Society.” [Tyee]