ON JANUARY 20, 2010, I received a tip that the Grieg Seafood farms in Nootka Sound, on the west side of Vancouver Island, were infested with sea lice that the drug Slice wouldn’t touch. This was alarming news because I knew that rising drug resistance in sea lice on salmon farms was having catastrophic impact on wild salmon and sea trout in Scotland and Norway.
The research coming out of those countries provided a remarkable narrative of how sea lice eventually became resistant to every drug developed to kill them. There were drugs, like Slice, that stopped them from making a shell as they moulted, and neurotoxins that made them lose their grip on the fish and fall off. When salmon famers began using other species of fish to pick the lice off and eat them, the lice responded by becoming transparent so that the cleaner fish simply could not see them. If sea lice became drug-resistant in British Columbia, their populations would explode in the farms and they would not only disfigure the farm fish, there would be no protection left for the wild salmon. As it stood in 2010, DFO and industry were clinging to the tired media line that sea lice were under control, that they weren’t convinced the lice were coming from the farms and that everything was fine.
Over the years I have received many tips from fish farmers. I have learned not to make a move until I hear the same report from several different and unrelated sources. This time, I wrote to Mia Parker, the communications person for Grieg Seafood, and got no answer. I wrote to the local First Nation fisheries and got no answer. Then several people who sounded like they were on scene began calling. They did not want to be identified, which is typical, but they provided eyewitness accounts and more details. They said that Grieg was culling their three-pound fish—seven pounds shy of harvest size—and moving others into fresher water, since freshwater kills sea lice.
I asked one of the people who called me if there was anyone concerned about wild salmon stocks in the Nootka Sound area who could step up and investigate this. The whistle-blower said no and went on to explain that representatives from Grieg had recently walked into the local watershed council meeting, where all issues affecting salmon are discussed, and dropped a fifty-thousand-dollar donation cheque on the table. This was an enormous sum for a group subsisting on bake sales and raffles to raise money to deal with wild salmon issues like stream habitat damage. The person who contacted me said that donations like this made it hard for people to admit that the salmon farms were doing damage. The industry was providing the first real money the watershed council had ever received.
Nootka wasn’t the only place I ran into a situation where a group dedicated to protecting salmon was given money or equipment by one of the Norwegian fish farm companies and consequently refused to consider the impact their donor was having on the very fish they were trying to save. One of the many reasons I admire Billy Proctor is that when he was president of the Scott Cove hatchery near Echo Bay, he refused a donation from Stolt Sea Farm, saying that he would “rather pick shit with the chickens.”
Next I wrote to the local point person for DFO, area supervisor John Lewis. He gave the well-worn response: the department was not in the driver’s seat, I needed to talk to the province. This was not entirely accurate, given that DFO, not the province, was technically in charge of protecting wild fish, which includes protecting them from industrial effluent. The sea lice from salmon farms were an industrial biological pollutant flowing unchecked into the ocean. The people I contacted at the province did not answer; I was back in the vortex of disregard.
Then another informant contacted me to say that the farm fish from the infected pens were being trucked to Quadra Island, off the other side of Vancouver Island, for processing. Quadra is one of the Discovery Islands, which are the heart of the Fraser River salmon migration route. If drug-resistant sea lice were introduced there, the threat to Fraser River wild salmon stocks would be enormous. At this point, I had spent nine years observing the impact of sea lice on young wild salmon. I had extended this research into the Discovery Islands, where the young wild salmon were scarred and dying of lice, just like in the Broughton. First Nations and conservation groups used my science to pressure government into ensuring that the local fish farmers began treating their fish with Slice; this allowed a much larger percentage of the young migrating wild salmon to survive. Transporting drug resistant lice into the Discovery Islands put this hard-won progress at risk.
When I called the province again, this time about trucking infested fish into the Discovery Islands, Trevor Rhodes, director of the Aquaculture branch of the provincial Ministry of Agriculture, stated that the lice on the salmon from the Grieg farms had a “minimal chance of survival” on the truck ride across the island. If any of them were released with the effluent from the processing plant, they would be dead and therefore no threat to Vancouver Island rivers or the Fraser River. I didn’t believe him. I had seen live lice moving around on the young salmon killed during the early years of my sea lice research. Researchers at the Salmon Coast Field Station were keeping lice alive for days on dead fish for use in experiments.
I asked my filmmaker friend Twyla Roscovich and Jody Eriksson, a fisherman and resident of the Discovery Islands, if they would dive the eighty feet down to the outfall pipe of the Walcan processing plant on Quadra where the Grieg lice-infested salmon were being processed and get me a sample. They were game. Twyla filmed the thick plume of blood spewing out of the facility’s effluent pipe, carrying scales and bits of hearts and other organs. Jody placed a fine-mesh plankton net over the end and held it there for several minutes, then sealed the net and carried it to the surface. He put the contents into jars on ice and shipped them to me by bus. I looked at the contents under a microscope and saw adult lice and hundreds of larval sea lice. I watched through the lens of my microscope as the sea lice eggs hatched: they were definitely alive. Because I knew this was going to be a controversial finding, I took pictures and then sent them to an expert in zooplankton at the federal Institute of Ocean Sciences, a branch of DFO. She confirmed they were larval Lepeophtheirus salmonis, the salmon louse. Though we had the video and we had the lice, government and industry kept insisting there were no lice. In fact they said there was no effluent, that what we’d seen was just street runoff.
A few weeks later, Jody and Twyla made the dive again and found nothing coming out of the pipe. When they surfaced, they saw the plant’s employees lined up watching them. So they went around the corner out of sight and, an hour later, dove in again, dragging themselves along the sea floor, hand-over-hand against the current, towards the plant. Sure enough, they found blood, guts and lice, likely drug-resistant, still flowing out of the pipe into the world’s biggest wild salmon migration route.
I had asked the people who had alerted me to this lice situation to take some video and please go public, but as usual they wouldn’t. Twyla convinced me we were going to have to go to the Grieg farm ourselves. So Jody trailered his speedboat, and we met up on a frosty January morning and headed for the west coast of Vancouver Island. We launched the boat into the calm waters of Nootka Sound and went in search of the farm fish packer, Viking Star. The online marine traffic website, MarineTraffic.com, showed it stationary at a Grieg farm in Esperanza Inlet, and so we headed that way.
Open to the Pacific Ocean, Nootka Sound is stunningly wild. We passed a raft of fifty sea otters bobbing in the gentle swell, holding paws to form a big slumber party. We passed two transient orca. We could feel the big ocean breathing under us in gentle swells, while the protective islands of this west coast paradise smoothed the waters.
The scene at the farm was shocking in contrast. Its generator throbbed a deep industrial undertone, the pumps on the Viking Star added another layer of noise, and the pneumatic hammer—used to kill each fish as it was pumped on deck from the pens before it was sluiced towards the ship’s hold—punctuated the quiet day. Female lice were gripping the packer’s black hull, their long egg strings hanging down. Jody leaned over the side of his boat and picked up a sea louse that was free-swimming; it had lost its grip on a salmon during the processing.
I dropped in a plankton net and we towed it around the farm for twenty minutes under the glares of the crew. I had done dozens of such plankton tows near farms; in twenty minutes, I generally caught one or two male lice and another couple of plankton-phase lice, which is the phase just after hatching, before they grow the equipment to latch onto a fish. Male lice jump off a fish if all the females on it are gravid with eggs; one mating allows a female to produce several batches of eggs and the males would rather take their chances free-swimming in the ocean looking for another fish, than stay on a fish where there was no foreseeable opportunity to reproduce. At this farm I counted 157 sea lice in my net after twenty minutes. Twyla filmed everything.
When we got back from this expedition, she edited together the footage from the farm, the effluent pipe and my microscope, showing that there was a serious sea louse problem in Nootka Sound and that these lice were entering the Discovery Islands alive, putting the Fraser River and wild salmon at grave risk. I then co-published a paper on this with scientists who had data they hadn’t understood until now. Why were there so many lice on young wild salmon in the bay on Quadra Island when there were no farms nearby, only a farm-salmon processing plant? We published “Sea louse infestation in wild juvenile salmon and Pacific herring associated with fish farms off the east-central coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia” in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management.
When municipal councillors representing the village of Tahsis, at the northern edge of Nootka Sound, saw Twyla’s film they voted to have the salmon farms removed from the region’s waters. Local fishermen and First Nations said their chum salmon run had collapsed in recent years. Of course it had: there was no way juvenile chum, which leave their rivers weighing less than a gram, could survive lice levels like this.
The solution was simple. Fine the company in the order of millions of dollars for exceeding sea louse limits and harming populations of wild salmon, and in that way, give the company the financial incentive to clean up or get out. But DFO and the province did nothing to stop the outbreak.
None of the science I did or the videos I commissioned made a difference to the wild salmon being eaten to death.