IN MAY 2001, a fishing lodge owner named Chris Bennett pulled up to my dock. He was not his usual cheerful self as he strode up the ramp, a bucket in hand.
“What are all these things all over these two salmon fry?” he said, holding the bucket up so I could see in. Fry are very young salmon. These little fish were bristling with short hair-like growths attached to their skin and they were not doing well. One was rolling over on its side, drifting downward, then rallying for a few seconds and trying to swim upright, only to start tilting again.
“These better not be sea lice,” Chris said. “Fishermen are coming from Scotland to fish with me now, because they say that sea lice from salmon farms killed off their wild salmon.”
Working as a deckhand, I had encountered sea lice on wild salmon, but these creatures were much smaller and a different shape. I had read a lot about sea lice in Salmon Farming, which also provided gruesome pictures of wild salmon covered in lice and farm salmon with so many lice grazing on their heads that their brains were exposed. The sea lice infestation in Scotland had driven local fishermen into the streets to protest against salmon farms.
I took a couple of pictures of Chris’s dying fish and promised to look into it. No one around here seemed to ask DFO about these things anymore; they came straight to me. I forwarded the pictures to scientists who were authoring papers on sea lice in Norway and Scotland.
An expert from Norway was the first to respond. “Yes, those are juvenile sea lice. What do you want to know?”
“How do I study them?”
“Do you have salmon farms?”
“Yes.”
“My suggestion to you is that you drop this. Your government won’t be happy with you, and the industry won’t be happy with you. You are going to have good years for lice and bad years and in the end you are not going to have wild salmon.”
This was alarming on so many levels.
Then a Scottish scientist wrote, “It’s sea lice. Can’t you guys read over there in Canada!” He went on to write that of course there would be sea lice on the young wild salmon of British Columbia, since they were swimming past salmon farms. Young wild Atlantic salmon and sea trout, which he was studying, could tolerate about one louse per gram of weight of the fish. Any more than that and the fish would die. The fish in Chris’s bucket weighed approximately 1.5 grams, and there were dozens of juvenile lice on them. They were dead fish swimming.
I emailed DFO about the sea lice. One of their biologists called me in response, asking me to collect some of the infected fish so they could see them. That was different, I thought: for once they weren’t denying the problem and they actually wanted to look at the fish. I made a fine-mesh dip net out of copper tubing and the crinoline from one of my daughter’s dresses. It wasn’t hard to dip up five lice-encrusted fish with much older lice than the ones on the fry Chris had brought me. I packed them on ice, ran them to town in my boat and put them on a bus to DFO’s Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo all on my dime. A few days later a black DFO Zodiac pulled up to my float, and a woman in full uniform, including holstered pistols and very serious-looking government-issued black shoes, came to my door.
When I answered her knock, she said, “I am here to charge you with poaching. You caught five undersized salmon without a scientific licence.”
Seriously, after twelve years of writing to DFO and being largely ignored, one of their biologists asks for samples over the phone so I have no record of the request, and they charge me with poaching! Clearly sea lice brought out the worst in the Department. In the end I only got a warning, but the Norwegian scientist was right. That was the start of the sea lice years.
A month later, DFO sent a large seine boat, Odysseus, to catch some of the lice-covered fish, perhaps in response to my images of lice-ravaged salmon appearing in newspapers and on the evening news. Unlike the other impacts of salmon farms, this one produced graphic images. Several environmental groups, including Living Oceans and the Georgia Strait Alliance, had stepped up to help me get this story out to the media. Now the Department could see that threatening me wasn’t going to be enough, they had to been seen to be doing something. However, the infested young salmon were hugging the shoreline and inhabiting shallow bays. Odysseus was too big, with too deep a draft, and fishing with a net that was too massive, to scoop these schools away from the shore. The skipper radioed me to ask where he could try. In the end he got seven sample juvenile pink salmon from the Broughton and DFO announced I was wrong—there was no sea louse problem.
I immediately got a scientific licence to protect myself from going to jail for collecting fish, went out with my homemade net and examined 775 salmon, each approximately six centimetres long. I counted 8,207 lice on them. Seventy-five percent of these fish were infected at or above the known lethal limit for other species of salmon; one had sixty-nine lice. These tiny salmon had an average of five lice per gram of their body weight, five times more than the Scottish and Norwegian research reported Atlantic salmon could survive. If their research also applied to Pacific salmon, these fish were in trouble; no one had ever reported an outbreak like this in decades of research on the Pacific’s young pink and chum salmon. I would go on to publish “Infestation of the sea louse Lepeophtheirus salmonis (Krøyer) on juvenile pink salmon Oncorhynchus gorbuscha (Walbaum) in British Columbia” in the Canadian Field Naturalist with Dr. Rob Williams, a colleague studying the impact of acoustic pollution on whales. He wanted to help and ran the statistics on my data.
Not all the farms in the Broughton were stocked that spring, as some had been harvested and not yet restocked. When I looked specifically at the young pink salmon caught near active farms, 98.4 percent were infected with an average of 12.3 lice. This suggested that only 2 percent of the wild pink salmon that passed the Broughton’s salmon farms in 2001 would return. There was a considerable amount of scoffing from salmon biologists when a whale researcher dared to predict a salmon run. They warned me that predicting salmon returns was complicated, and I agreed—I didn’t know anything about predicting wild salmon returns. But, though no one else in Canada had ever seen the lice numbers I recorded, scientists in Scotland and Norway were very familiar with sea louse outbreaks on young wild salmon near salmon farms. My calculations were based on their science.
The damage to the young Pacific salmon was visually catastrophic. These fish did not yet have a protective sheath of armour-like scales. The large female lice left tracks on the little fry where their appendages had punctured the fish as they gripped it. Some of the lice were grazing on the fishes’ eyeballs. Other lice had dark red streaks down their translucent backs, the blood of the young salmon visible in their pulsing digestive tracts. These fish were no longer plump and glossy, but pockmarked with holes eaten into them, their bellies sucked in around their rib cage.
I made an appointment with the DFO senior scientist in charge of the sampling attempted by the Odysseus, Dr. Dick Beamish, to discuss the disparity between his results and mine. I knew the Department would make a public statement at some point soon. I suspected, given my experience, they would try to deflect my concern. Beamish was at a disadvantage, in that he had not seen the outbreak himself. I, however, had been aboard the Odysseus and saw that while the seven pinks they caught at the western edge of the archipelago were lice-free, the chum salmon they’d caught had so many lice hanging off them it looked like they were wrapped in shag carpeting. Did he know about them? Since a multitude of southern wild salmon runs migrate along the western edge of the archipelago, the seven pink salmon, caught just inside that geographic boundary, may not have swum past the farms.
I came to the meeting with Beamish carrying a few fish preserved in glass jars filled with alcohol so he could see the condition they were in, along with data and photos to allow him to draw his conclusions from a larger perspective. He thanked me for coming, but was condescending, making sure I knew that as far as he was concerned my observations meant nothing. As I left, he actually offered me a Beanie Baby, a child’s toy he collected. It was humiliating. A few days later, he went ahead and announced there was no sea louse problem in the Broughton Archipelago. The salmon farming industry actually accused me of sticking the lice on the fish and taking pictures.
The next year, 2002, I armed myself with another scientific licence and a better net and learned how to identify all the life stages of a sea louse and to distinguish males from females.
For the first thirty days after they hatch, sea lice change their body size and shape every few days, so you can tell how long a louse has been on a fish. Beginning in mid-April I counted lice on sixty fish at six sites, once a week for ten weeks.
Where there were no farms, the young fish were perfect shimmering slips in sparkling shades of silver and iridescent blue. They grew rapidly as their internal programming drew them to migrate slowly to the west and north. As they passed the salmon farms at Glacier Falls, Burdwood and Wicklow, the little hair-like lice that I’d seen on Chris’s fish appeared. These were the youngest lice, called copepodites. In a few hours they extruded a tiny filament and cemented it to the fish so they wouldn’t fall off and became chalimus-stage lice. Thus tethered, they grew and, like a horse ground-staked in a field that eats the grass down to bare dirt, the lice ate through the fish’s skin and into its flesh.
In the natural world (or the “real world,” as Billy likes to say) so few salmon stay in the archipelago over the winter that there are not enough to host large sea louse populations. So come springtime, when young wild salmon leave the rivers and enter the ocean for the first time, there are not enough sea lice to harm them. However, in this new unnatural world, where schools of 600,000 to a million Atlantic salmon are swimming in circles in farms along the coast, sea lice breed on the crowded fish like never before and release billions of larval lice every spring into the young wild salmon migration routes.
I reached out to other researchers in northern BC who were studying pink and chum salmon in Prince Rupert, Rivers Inlet, Smith Inlet and Bella Bella—places on the BC coast with no salmon farms. They generously allowed me to examine the fish they had collected for other types of research, which allowed me, at no cost, to expand my study to cover two-thirds of the province’s coastline.
I would publish “Sea lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) infection rates on juvenile pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and chum (Oncorhynchus keta) salmon in the nearshore marine environment of British Columbia, Canada” in 2004 in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, with Dr. Rick Routledge, Aleria Ladwig and Corey Peet. The scientific team I could call on was growing. Dr. Routledge was a professor of statistics at Simon Fraser University; Corey Peet was a young scientist with an environmental organization that had been involved on this issue for a few years. Aleria Ladwig, the DFO representative for the Broughton area, got into serious trouble with the Department for being listed on this paper. We discovered that where there were no farms, there were almost no lice. The highest 2002 louse count outside the Broughton was a total of two lice on a sample of 566 fish. Meanwhile in the Broughton, 90 percent of young wild salmon were infected. Broughton fish had eight times more lice after they’d passed a fish farm and there were five times more lice on wild fish near farms stocked with farm fish that had been in the sea pens for over a year compared to fish that had been in the farms for less than a year. The numbers of copepodites spiked near the farms, suggesting the farms harboured the mother lice, which carry their eggs in string-like “tails.”
As the little pink and chum salmon reached the first fish farms on their migratory path, many weighed just 0.3 grams. They weren’t big enough to survive a single louse, and yet they were sprinkled with more lice at every farm they passed. I named a bay in Fife Sound the Bay of the Damned, because by the time the little salmon reached it, the lice had overwhelmed them. They hardly looked like fish, they were shrunken and blotched, pricked full of holes. Their gill covers were grazed away and they had lice on their eyeballs. They lay on the surface of the water waiting to die, and the kingfishers snapped them up.
As I approached a school of fish, I could tell if they had lice on them, because the newly infected fish were jumping, trying to dislodge the lice. Fish shivered as the lice crawled across their skin. The suffering was incalculable. Imagine having a parasite the size of a rat attached to you, gnawing away, and having no hands to remove it.
After counting them I couldn’t leave the lice on them. At first the fish were scared of my tweezers, but after I removed one louse, the fish would stay still and let me get every one. I knew the fish were so full of holes that the ability of their skin to keep the salt out was shot, that viruses had an open door to their bodies and that there were billions more lice waiting for them at the next farm. But these moments of one-on-one first aid were therapeutic for us both, even if the relief was short-lived. When I asked the salmon farmers to let me count lice on their fish they refused. They were not the problem, supposedly, but they wouldn’t let me confirm that.
The environmental groups did a good job telling the public that the wild salmon they loved so much were being eaten to death by sea lice from salmon farms. Dozens of newspapers printed my pictures. People were horrified. Every time the salmon farming industry applied for a new tenure, the application was sent for review to the First Nation whose territory it was in. While many nations had signed financial agreements with the companies and approved the tenures, the Broughton nations did neither. Yet Stolt Sea Farm was gifted with yet another tenure in Tribune Channel, called Humphrey Rock, by the province, against the wishes of the First Nations and despite the escalating public reaction to the sea louse outbreaks.
That spring of 2002 an unprecedented thing happened. Dr. Brian Riddell of DFO, who had been seconded to the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, contacted me saying that he wanted to come up for a few days and look at the fish. I was so relieved that finally a salmon expert was going to assess the situation.
I took him into the bays where the fish formed big schools and Riddell stared intently at them. Leaning over the side of my boat, he muttered under his breath, “This isn’t right, this is not right.” He was a human encyclopedia on salmon. He understood how bad the infestation was.
That fall, 99 percent of the Broughton pink salmon that had migrated to sea the year before through the sea louse epidemic did not return. Pink salmon returns were good coastwide, except to the seven rivers of the Broughton where DFO counted returning salmon. This was even worse than the 98 percent drop my data had predicted. Brian Riddell called a meeting of DFO and provincial staff responsible for the salmon farms. There may have been representatives from fish farming there too, but I don’t remember them. As I drove the two hours down to the meeting in Campbell River, I readied myself for the fight. My warnings had been ignored for over a decade, and now the industry appeared to be killing off massive amounts of wild fish. If I had been charged for poaching five young fish, what should happen to those responsible for destroying millions?
Riddell spoke first. He said sea lice from salmon farms appeared to be killing massive numbers of pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, and he recommended taking all the farms out of the area for one year to see what happened. I could not believe my ears. A thrill of hope shot through me. I held my breath waiting to hear what the provincial regulators would say in the face of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ chief scientist responsible for salmon. Their pushback was feeble. The provincial reps countered that they would be willing to order that all farm salmon on the primary migration route of the Broughton pink salmon be removed for one year. I went on record to object that I didn’t think this would work, because in six hours in the Broughton sea lice could drift ten kilometres, the distance the tides moved twice daily. I said all the farms needed to be removed.
However, Riddell was a better negotiator than me. He agreed with the regulators and then turned to me, asking me to pick the route. It would only be for one year, 2003, but it was the first victory in this fight in the thirteen years. I remember driving back with my windows rolled down and the music up high. As soon as I got home I created a map. The majority of wild salmon in the Broughton, even those from the Glendale River in Knight Inlet, migrated to sea via Tribune Channel, through the Burdwood Islands, and out Fife Sound. This should be the fallow route.
As usual, the province and the fish farm companies whittled away at the plan. First they nixed the easternmost third of the route, which left three salmon farms in operation and put the Glendale pink salmon at risk. Then they revised the plan so that the farms could either be empty or stocked with young fish, which my own research had shown were less damaging to the wild salmon than older fish. They also switched the name from the Sea Louse Action Plan to the Pink Salmon Action Plan.
I began counting sea lice on young wild salmon early in the spring of 2003 to measure the impact of the fallowing. By now I had upgraded to a beach seine instead of a dip net. The seine was 150 feet long and about 7 feet deep, one edge of the net lined with little floats and the other lined with lead weights, called the lead line. I nosed my boat up to the shore, jumped out, tied a line from the net piled up in my boat to a tree or boulder, got back in the boat and backed around in a large half-circle as the net played out. Then I jumped out of the boat again farther down the beach, walked along the beach to pull the net closed and then hauled the net in, mounding it on the rocky beach and leaving a pocket of the net in the water. I gently scooped up one hundred little fish from this pocket in the net at each site. This was my sample to examine for lice.
The beach seine allowed me to see all kinds of fish. Along with the salmon, I looked at herring, greenling, rock cod, sand lance, sculpins, pilchard and shiner perch. All the fish species were infected with lice. The voracious coho and chinook smolts, the “teenager” phase for salmon, much bigger than the baby pink and chum salmon fry, used the net to their advantage and grabbed the littler fish, swallowing them as fast as they could. When they were full they would grab another fish and swim around with it T-boned in their mouths.
The improvement in the condition of the young salmon in 2003 was unmistakable. The number of sea lice dropped from the average of seven lice per fish in 2002 to less than one. If these fish were to survive, this was the direction things had to go. This improvement showed that as salmon farms are removed sea lice infection of young wild salmon plummets.
When Dr. Dick Beamish, from DFO, submitted a paper on the increase in survival rate of the Broughton pink salmon during the one year that the salmon farms were fallow (in 2003 up 1,480 percent from 2002) to a scientific journal for publication, the journal sent a copy to me for review. It is standard practice for journals, before they accept scientific manuscripts for publication, to send them to other scientists in the same field. Such peer review is generally anonymous. I never know who is reviewing my work, and Beamish did not know I was reviewing his. He had completely omitted mention of the drastic measures put in place with the Pink Salmon Action Plan and its potential role in the unheard of rise in survival rate. Instead, the premise of his paper was that wild and farm salmon can coexist.
I recommended that his paper not be published without reporting the fallowing of salmon farms on the pink salmon migration route. When Beamish rejected my comment, I did not change my position. This went back and forth, until finally the editor asked whether I felt comfortable revealing my identity in order to resolve the situation. When I did Beamish immediately inserted a terse acknowledgement that some of the farms had been fallowed in 2003. If the paper had been published without recognition of the fallowing, its readers would have drawn a false conclusion that pink salmon were thriving among salmon farms. The opposite was true: pink salmon thrived when salmon farming on wild salmon migration routes was heavily reduced.
Many of us, including some DFO scientists, academics, Dr. Riddell and myself, requested that the fallowing experiment be repeated. If something happens once it could be a coincidence, but if the farms had been fallowed a second year and sea lice levels stayed low and wild salmon survival remained high, the evidence that salmon farms were driving Broughton salmon towards extinction would have been stronger. Not only were we turned down, but the province removed all reference to the Pink Salmon Action Plan from its website. The result did not support policy. Fallowing farms had worked too well, better than anyone expected. If people saw that wild salmon only thrived without salmon farms, the federal and provincial governments would have had to do something permanent about those farms.
Sea lice are a naturally occurring parasitic crustacean that has evolved to live on salmon. Female lice have two long tail-like structures that contain 250 to 500 eggs, stacked like hockey pucks, which remain attached to the female until they hatch. The newly hatched lice have no ability to hang on to a salmon; instead they have a helicopter-like attachment on their head that enables them to drift in the current. This ensures that the babies don’t parasitize their mom’s host fish and build up lice numbers that would be lethal to it.
After several days adrift, the larval lice moult into a new body and now they are ready to catch a salmon, the only fish they can complete their life cycle on. Though they are born with innate instructions to jump up really fast if a shadow passes over them, most young lice never find a salmon and die.
When they do find a salmon host, the lice moult within hours, and after extruding a tiny filament from their heads and cementing themselves to the fish, they can relax and graze on salmon mucus and grow and moult four more times as they increase in size. On the fifth moult, they disengage from the tether and adopt a suction-method of staying aboard the fish. Now they can move around on the fish, find mates and tuck into the least turbulent locations on the fish, just past the arc of the belly in the indent above the salmon’s anal fin. There the lice keep moulting four more times as they grow. Eventually, they die when the salmon enters freshwater, which is lethal to sea lice.
In the wild, their difficult childhood keeps lice populations low. Sea lice don’t seem to bother wild salmon, which appear to make more than enough mucus to feed a few lice and still protect themselves from disease. The problem caused by the salmon farms is the million or so salmon going around in circles that never migrate out to sea. Thus the lice keep breeding in the bays along the coast all winter, and in the spring their reproduction accelerates as water temperatures increase. Instead of entering an archipelago swept clean by the tides of winter, young wild salmon were migrating through clouds of lice at every operating farm.
Amy McConnell volunteered as my deckhand for my sea louse work. We became a well-oiled team, setting the beach seine net, collecting the fish in buckets, measuring and counting tens of thousands of lice and then setting the fish free. As I backed the boat away, releasing the 150-foot net into the water in a half-circle, Amy walked down the beach a short distance and caught the line I threw from the other end of the net. She then pulled in the net, corralling the fish in the bunt, while I lifted the bottom of the net over submerged rocks and sunken logs. Some mornings my daughter slept in the bow of the boat, and we tried not to wake her—we called these “whisper sets.”
This research showed that young wild salmon always and only get infected near salmon farms and that when the farms are empty, or even if the salmon in the farms are young and therefore have a lower accumulation of lice, the sea lice numbers on the wild salmon plummet.
I began to publish several papers a year on my sea lice research, and hoped that the appearance of these papers in international scientific journals would help the BC government understand that the sea lice pouring out of the salmon farms were driving wild salmon numbers down. But even at this pace, my research was not enough to bring the relief wild salmon needed to survive.
What could I do now? I’d watched so many young salmon die, losing their struggle to stay upright and alive. I had done talk shows and other media interviews, and met with fishing and tourism organizations, but it was not enough. I realized more people needed to see the suffering and loss and so I invited other scientists to the Broughton, offering to feed and house them while they were here. They came. Dinner was pretty much the same every night—brown rice cooked in coconut milk, kale from the garden and whatever else was at hand. My daughter, now six, dubbed this meal “glop.” But it was all I could afford, and it was nutritious, inexpensive, stick-to-your-ribs food.
The teams of young scientists who stayed with us were hard-working and brilliant. They pursued more answers as to what the sea louse epidemic meant to the young wild salmon. With crews of volunteers, they travelled much farther than I did, sampling fish over a larger area. We published on the technique of counting lice without killing the fish, showing that we got the same results whether the fish were dead or alive and that fish could survive the procedure. After scooping approximately a hundred fish out of the seine net with a bucket, we deployed a tiny aquarium net to transfer each fish gently into a small plastic bag along with a little seawater. The fish could survive in the bag for a couple of minutes; during that time we examined them through the bag with a hand lens. We measured them by laying the bag, with the fish in it, on a piece of graph paper and counting off the squares. Then we released them into dark-coloured recovery buckets; we’d learned that these little salmon changed their colour to match the buckets. When we put them into white buckets, they lightened enough to make them easy targets for predators.
Of the scientists, two young women used a kids’ inflatable swimming pool with a camera rigged overhead to discover that even if lice didn’t kill a fish, a single louse exerted enough drag to put the fish in the high-risk “predator zone” at the back of the school. Another student rigged a model blue heron that tipped and hit the surface of the water. Every time this happened, all the fish darted away, but he saw that the fish that were infected with lice returned to this predator zone much faster than the healthy fish. He surmised that because the heavy grazing of the lice was draining the young fishes’ resources, the infested fish became desperate for food and this drove them to take risks that would lead to increased capture by predators.
One young researcher caught cutthroat trout, put them in tanks and gave them a choice of eating a lousy or a lice-free fish. The trout preferred the lousy fish, and as they ate, the male lice jumped onto the trout. One cutthroat participated with such great enthusiasm, snapping up one lousy fry after the next, his researcher nicknamed him Wolf. Wolf sat perfectly still between trials to let the young man pick the lice off him. When the experiment was over, the scientist took Wolf back to the bay where he was captured and released him.
My home became known as Camp Sea Lice.
DFO finally had to accept that there really was an abnormally high number of lice in the Broughton, but they still weren’t ready to make the logical conclusion that similar to everywhere salmon farming occurred, the farms were the reason. Around 2005, they began to lay the blame for the lice infestation on the prickly little fish, the stickleback. Researchers at Camp Sea Lice soon showed this could not be true: the high-relief stickleback scales have a jagged edge that caused the lice to lose their suction grip; also, stickleback simply did not produce enough slime to graze on. Lice could not complete their life cycle aboard a stickleback and thus were unable to reproduce. Furthermore, the young researchers discovered that stickleback actually tried to eat lice off salmon. They were not the problem.
The lengths that DFO went to exonerate the salmon farmers, despite everything that was known and everything we published, would have been funny if the consequences weren’t so disturbing. In 2005, one DFO scientist, who I thought had seemed onside with the truth of the situation, told the media that he hadn’t found all the lice I was talking about. He didn’t mention that he had compared my 2002 data with his 2003 data (the fallow year). I knew that he knew my 2003 data was nearly identical to his. He retired shortly after he made those comments.
In 2004, the farms were restocked and the pink salmon populations continued to collapse. Bear tour guides said that the bears that had gathered at the Glendale River in August to fatten up on pink salmon were so hungry they were starting to eat each other. Tourists were traumatized. The lodge at Glendale began to lend boats to some of the Camp Sea Lice researchers, hoping we could deal with this growing threat to their industry. It might have been better if they had also hired lobbyists, like the fish farmers had.
As DFO reluctantly acknowledged that sea lice were real, the big question became, how many lice does it take to kill a young Pacific salmon? Maybe all these salmon infected with lice were fine. I needed that number so I could report on how many wild salmon the industry was killing. In 2005, I set up an experiment to find out. My partner, Eric, modified sixteen 50-gallon plastic barrels, fitting screens over the ends to allow seawater to flow through them and cutting a door flap in the top. I tied them along a U-shaped arrangement of floats and logs at my dock. I went out and caught young salmon and sorted them into the barrels according to how many lice they had. It was a massive undertaking. To get the right number of fish with the right number of lice on them, I had to examine 1,080 fish caught in the beach seine with my hand lens. Sixty fish went into each barrel. Three sets of four barrels per trial were stocked with fish with zero lice, four barrels had fish with one louse, four with three lice and four with four lice. Once the barrels were stocked, I fed all the fish the same amount every day and watched over them for thirty-five days. When local river otters became too interested, I set up a tent and my daughter and I camped by the fish. Ahta, a husky-lab cross was just a puppy then, and too terrified of the otters to chase them off, but she woke me by trying to dive under my sleeping bag every time she heard them and I scared the otters off.
I invited DFO scientists to view the experiment while it was running so that there wouldn’t be any doubts or criticism later. Then, to strengthen the result, I ran the whole experiment two more times. I camped on the dock for over three months on otter patrol. The fish without lice grew impressively fast and went free at the end of each trial, but if just one louse remained attached long enough to moult into its adult stages, the fish died. I carefully preserved all the dead fish in case the Department wanted to examine them. I thought I had thoroughly guarded against anyone being able to dismiss these results. I published “Mortality rates for juvenile pink Oncorhynchus gorbuscha and chum O. keta salmon infested with sea lice Lepeophtheirus salmonis in the Broughton Archipelago” in the Alaska Fishery Research Bulletin.
The next year, a DFO scientist named Simon Jones did a similar experiment in a laboratory set-up. Before his study was over, I began hearing rumours that the fish in his trial were not dying of lice. I simply could not believe this. I had spent three months watching a total of 3,240 fish. The ones with even a single mature louse died. I made an appointment with Dr. Jones to view the fish in his experiment.
He took me into the lab with the fish tanks at four in the afternoon. It was pitch black inside.
“Simon, I can’t see anything,” I said.
“Yes, well, I can’t turn the lights on. I am replicating the daylight hours in the Broughton,” he explained.
“It is never dark in the archipelago at 4 p.m.,” I said.
Dr. Jones did not respond and he did not turn on the lights. We stood awkwardly in the dark until I left.
What I should have done was go back the next day and the next and the day after that until he showed me the fish. But I didn’t, and as a result I never saw these fish, which were allegedly thriving despite the lice or any pictures of them. When Jones published his finding that young pink salmon were quite resistant to sea lice, it was used to discredit mine. Marty Krkošek, the first young scientist to work out of my place in the Broughton, did the experiment yet again, using a different and more robust method with a larger number of fish. He too found that sea lice kill young wild salmon. Jones’s result was an outlier, but DFO clung to it like a life raft in the rising sea of evidence that salmon farms were killing wild salmon.
Fortunately, from about 2003 to 2008, a lot of people demanded an end to death by sea lice for the runs of wild salmon in the Broughton. Images of young salmon wounded by the lice appeared on billboards in downtown Vancouver. We at Camp Sea Lice published our findings in one of the highest-impact journals in the world, Science. Environmental groups were drawn to help and they were relentless pressuring government. They were the first to make the point that the solution was to move this industry onto land so that the province could benefit from both wild salmon and aquaculture. The Living Oceans Society, Georgia Strait Alliance and Watershed Watch were leaders in this effort. Elected Chief Councillor Robert Chamberlin of the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis, one of the nations in the archipelago, a highly skilled statesman, became a force for wild salmon that government could not ignore. The nations of the Broughton delivered a clear message: they had zero tolerance for salmon farms.
In response to all this pressure, the province made the salmon farmers treat the fish in their pens with a drug called Slice to reduce the number of farm lice before the young wild salmon left the rivers in the spring. For a few years sea lice levels plummeted and the wild salmon bounced back. Everyone knew this was a temporary fix, because around the world sea lice were becoming resistant to drugs. As well, Slice was designed to prevent sea lice from forming a shell. It entered the ocean in farm fish feces and the crumbs of the medicated feed that blew out of the feeders. While I didn’t do any research on this, many local animals that need to make a shell were likely attracted to the drug-laced feed, including prawns, crabs and shrimp. Prawn and shrimp fishermen were coming to me outraged at the decline in their catches near salmon farms.
These are the choices that burden society today. When we abandon natural systems honed over millennia of evolution and try to build new ones shaped by share price and global markets, we have to expect a high failure rate. As the American ecologist Frank Golley said, “Ecosystems are not only more complicated than we think, they are more complicated than we can think.” Like a long slow fuse on a bomb, the impact of an action we take may seem manageable until suddenly it is not. If the politicians thought about the issue of sea lice at all, I am guessing they simply hoped the outcome would be delayed until they were no longer in office. Billy Proctor complained that the life cycle of a politician was shorter than a pink salmon’s, so they never bore the consequences of their actions.
I knew Slice was bad and wrong for the archipelago, but I couldn’t stand in the way of its application because the unique wild salmon DNA that fit Broughton rivers like a key to a lock was dying out. When it’s gone, it’s gone for good. The alternative was to keep fighting for the perfect solution, while allowing sea lice from salmon farms to drive wild salmon populations towards extinction. Slice might protect the young salmon from lice, but these salmon fed on zooplankton with shells that the drug was likely affecting. As long as the farms remained, it was a vicious circle with no good choices or outcomes.
In 2008, the filmmaker Twyla Roscovich asked if she could come live with me and make short films on my work. Twyla was a human hurricane who dominated every room she walked into. She was supersized in every way; even her feet were so big she never fit into women’s shoes. She was a strikingly beautiful woman with a husky voice whom I first met when she was only eighteen and making a film on killer whales with the BBC. Her dad, whom she loved very much, was one of the early fish farmers, and she had spent much of her childhood on that farm. But she was able to look beyond her background to see the senseless monster that the industry had become. I saw in her the same filmmaking talent I’d seen in Robin, my late husband, and since more people needed to know about what salmon farming was doing to the coast of British Columbia, I said yes.
Together we made several short films, including one that was aired at the annual general meeting of Cermaq in Norway to make a plea to the shareholders that their company was crushing the life out of a place on the other side of the planet. Twyla filmed the sea lice and how we did the research and posted these films on her site, Calling from the Coast. She was never strident in her films; an innately gifted storyteller, she worked long hours to perfect the message. She deeply loved this coast, as I do, and she helped enormously in bringing this issue to people in a way that they could understand. The vast majority of us don’t follow our minds, we follow our hearts. It’s love that makes people stand up and react. The only places that are going to survive us are the places we love so fiercely that giving up is not an option, at whatever the cost.
When my daughter’s father and I split in 2008 (and who could blame him, when all I did was sea lice science), I had to put my place up for sale, even though I didn’t want to abandon the industrious young researchers of Camp Sea Lice, leaving them with no base to work from. Then a very unusual buyer named Sarah Haney appeared. She bought my homestead and asked if I would keep running it as a research station!
Sarah rolled her sleeves up and worked as the cook while crews arrived to install more solar panels, add a micro-hydro system that produced electricity from running water, and upgraded the dock and kitchen. We formed a society and Camp Sea Lice became the Salmon Coast Field Station; some of the original students joined the board of directors. Scott Rogers, who ran several years of sea lice sampling, stepped up to become the first onsite manager.
While I had vowed to never to start a research station, because I did not want to be surrounded by people that I needed to look after, I could see why others had taken this path. It is stressful trying to keep it funded and it won’t last forever, but every year the station exists, we learn more about the impact of salmon farms and what wild salmon need in order to survive. If the farms were removed, we would need to act fast to salvage what is left. Knowing what is broken and how it was broken would speed that process. Without the work done at my field camp, the disappearance of the wild salmon of the Broughton would have been a mystery and nothing would have been done to try to save them.
The sea lice surveys I began in 2001 are still continuing. Long-term databases like this are as rare as they are valuable. Sliding baseline is a term used to describe the massive forgetting that is occurring worldwide. People such as Billy Proctor and the Elders of the Indigenous communities are the knowledge holders, reminding us of what was. I am becoming a holder of valuable knowledge too, even with my much shorter experience in the archipelago, because so much has changed in the thirty years I’ve lived here. Newcomer biologists don’t know that this was once a wintering ground for the A5 whale families. In fact I fear the whales themselves might not know this anymore. Most of the matriarchs who were out in front picking the routes when they were chased away by the farms have died.
Our efforts and the use of Slice bought the salmon populations of the Broughton a fifteen-year life extension. But in 2015 the sea lice returned at lethal levels, perhaps due to the evolution of resistance to Slice in the lice, which (though the farmers denied this) happens everywhere salmon farmers operate in ocean pens.
By 2018, so few young salmon migrated out of the rivers of the Broughton that they were nearly invisible. When I began studying sea lice, there were so many young salmon they formed a near-continuous ribbon of tiny fish a couple of metres wide over the length of Tribune Channel. They filled entire bays. I lay on the roof of my boat on many days, drifting among them, because I loved watching them. To catch zooplankton, they coil into an S shape and then release, which causes them to dart forward. They often nudged the surface of the water in pursuit of prey, the bays of the archipelago so dimpled with their presence it looked like rain.
Now there are only small panicked schools. They know it is risky to be the last fish or the outside fish in the school, in the predator zone. But in the small groups of just a few dozen fish I observed in 2018 and 2019 there really is no safe zone. Only 0.1 percent of the pink salmon run returned to the Glendale River, Broughton’s biggest river, in 2019. A local photographer, Rolf Hicker, posted photos of emaciated grizzly bears, starved for salmon, that went viral. It was no comfort at all that I had seen this coming.