ON AUGUST 29, 2008, Dr. Peter McKenzie of Mainstream (the company that later became Cermaq) submitted four fresh tissue samples of Atlantic salmon to Dr. Gary Marty’s lab. The company asked the lab to run molecular virus tests (virology) and to study the samples through a microscope for signs of cellular damage caused by disease (histology). Dr. Marty labelled it “Case: 08-3362.”
The testing revealed the first evidence of heart and skeletal muscle inflammation disease outside of Norway. HSMI was a mystery illness spreading fast through the salmon farming industry in Norway. Millions of farm salmon were becoming listless, barely moving and refusing to eat. Not knowing whether their condition was caused by environment, diet or a pathogen, the farmers had no way to halt the disease’s spread. There was also no way to screen imported eggs for it. In 2010, a team of virus sleuths in Norway and the United States reported that the cause of HSMI appeared to be piscine reovirus (PRV, later named piscine orthoreovirus), which used the red blood cells in fish to make copies of itself. As the virus filled those cells, it leaked out, inflaming and weakening the salmon’s heart and skeletal muscles.
In Case 08-3362 Dr. Marty wrote, “This pattern of inflammation has also been described with Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation in Atlantic salmon raised in Europe, but this disease has not been identified in BC salmon.” As the disease was highly contagious and weakened infected fish to the point that they became catatonic, every Atlantic salmon showing signs of it should have been removed from contact with wild salmon. Norwegian researchers were concerned that the disease might be more harmful to wild salmon than to farm salmon. It would make them extremely weak and thus vulnerable to predation and unable to swim up a river.
My neighbour and friend Billy Proctor once found half of a stone fire-starting tool on a beach where an ancient village had stood in the Broughton. Ten years later he found the other half on the same beach. The pieces fit together perfectly and became a significant find. Something similar would happen with Case 08-3362. At first it was only an isolated mention of a new salmon disease. Eight years later, I found the rest of the pieces that would reveal the significance of this case to the survival of wild salmon in British Columbia.
I’d found Dr. Marty’s report on Case 08-3362 among the fish health records downloaded to the Cohen Commission. When I began hunting viruses in the markets, rivers and marine waters of British Columbia, I added testing for PRV to the short list of viruses I requested the lab to screen for.
The storm we’d caused with our ISAV results had bonded the people at the lab on Prince Edward Island, Dr. Rick Routledge and me. We were now a team. I did much of the fieldwork, the virologists in the lab ran the tests and produced the results, and Rick crunched the statistics that made sense of what we found; we co-wrote and published the results. As I became the target of what I can only call a smear campaign, funding and collaborators fell away, but there were always just enough funds to continue so long as none of us were paid for our work. I was able to just about cover the expenses to travel to the remote reaches of the province, courier samples across the country and run the tests.
Viruses are a long way down the evolutionary ladder from the whales I began my scientific career studying. I received a steady stream of criticism from scientists, industry representatives and politicians that I should not be studying viruses, because I am not a virologist. True, but I am a field scientist. I can find the fish, take the samples and send them to the research lab where virologists take the next steps.
We were able to keep going thanks to two funders that stuck with us and crowd fundraisers that I posted on social media. We stretched those funds and remained uniquely free to explore the questions we deemed important.
Nearly all salmon disease research looks solely at farm fish. That’s where the money is. So while many teams of people were studying farm fish disease worldwide, almost none were looking at wild fish health. This was similar to the situation I’d encountered with sea lice. There was no research on the impact of the lice on wild fish in British Columbia until Camp Sea Lice and then the Salmon Coast Field Station were created.
Like us, DFO staff scientist Dr. Kristi Miller was very interested in the health of wild salmon; her cutting-edge technique of studying genomic immune response patterns has enormous potential to yield insights into the fish. But Dr. Miller was ruthlessly micromanaged by her bosses and political masters. She was told which fish she could test, which pathogens were off limits and what tests she could use. Then, when she tried to speak about the results, she was muzzled for many years. Her testimony at the Cohen Commission made it obvious to me that, in order to break the ice that was impeding research into the role of pathogens in wild salmon survival, wild salmon needed someone to do this research who was beyond the grip of the government and industry handlers. The team I was a part of became the small icebreaker that would eventually allow movement by the larger ships—research teams with universities and from the Pacific Salmon Foundation.
We decided to do a study that would compare infection rates in wild salmon that were exposed to salmon farms against those that were unexposed, similar to the work I had done on sea lice infections in wild salmon. This meant sampling wild salmon throughout British Columbia, both from the coast and from some of the biggest rivers, as well as farm salmon from markets. We concentrated on a few viruses, including ISAV and PRV. I was interested, first, in what percentage of farm salmon were infected and, second, in what percentage of the wild salmon were being infected as they passed the farms. British Columbia is a big province; the sampling took two years. I searched the scientific literature for similar studies, but no one had published, in any country, on whether wild salmon that swam near fish farms were more infected with PRV and ISAV than wild salmon that never went near farms. This was an obvious study, essential to our understanding of the impact of salmon farms on wild salmon. I felt the absence of such work in the scientific literature revealed the long arm of the salmon farming industry. Without this knowledge, the industry and others could repeat that there was no evidence of impact on wild fish.
My 2010 trip up the Fraser River had given me a head start: I knew where to find the salmon I wanted to sample. When the First Nations fishery teams who had been so generous with their knowledge in 2010 didn’t answer my first round of emails about my sampling program, I sent another email saying I hoped to meet up with them on the river. No answer to that one either. When I ran into one First Nations team on a riverbank, they told me that if they talked to me, DFO would withdraw all their funding, so they’d lose their jobs. I understood. We wished each other luck and went our separate ways. I did wonder how many other people were being pressured to thwart research into viruses associated with the salmon farming industry. I know I was an intense object of DFO and industry interest because of the results of my access to information requests. I had seen, for example, correspondence among DFO staff discussing whether they could prohibit me from testing dead salmon: Was I breaking any laws by sampling dead fish in the rivers? Apparently I was not.
I relied on Jody Eriksson and Farlyn Campbell to sample the more northern areas of BC. Jody and Far were as independent and resourceful as it gets. Both of them had been raised off-grid in a tiny community in the Discovery Islands; with no school nearby, they’d absorbed a wealth of knowledge by other means. Neither of them knew what impossible meant. When they headed upcoast on my shoestring research budget, hitching rides into remote river valleys on helicopters and boats, people they encountered loved them so much they sent me the money to keep the pair going.
I also collected samples from the beach seines we used in the ongoing annual sea lice research, and I covered the lower Fraser River myself to sample spawning salmon. During commercial fishing openings, fishermen let me sample their catch if I was quick about it.
I also bought hundreds of farm salmon, checking the best-before date for the freshest I could find. People would look at the pile of farm salmon in my cart and ask whether I was catering an event and how I was going to cook them. “Oh, I am not going to eat these,” I would answer, leaving them bewildered. I didn’t want to alert the stores that I was shopping for viruses, but I couldn’t bear the idea that people thought my heap of farm salmon looked appetizing. One woman cracked, after checking out my load, “Honey, you ought to learn to fish.”
When I started to buy farm salmon for testing, I rooted around to locate and include the skinniest fish and the ones with open sores and deformities. After Salmon Confidential came out, such fish disappeared from the markets. Also, shoppers in the stores began to recognize me. I received a lot of smiles and thumbs-up. A few people even paid the cashier for me, saying it was the least they could do. Somehow they all knew not to mention the testing inside the stores.
I also went to sushi restaurants, hoping to find the freshest samples there. I’d take a seat, order farm salmon sashimi, and then with tweezers and a scalpel take slivers of the flesh and plop them into vials. Then I’d check out the Styrofoam coolers stacked in the alleys behind the restaurants, noting the names of the companies printed on them so that I had some idea of the source of my samples. The coolers from Cermaq had Cook before eating printed on them. Really? No one was cooking farm salmon in sushi restaurants. But perhaps this kind of warning protected Cermaq in some way.
Health Canada actually exempts farm salmon from regulations that apply to other fish served raw, which has to be frozen to very low temperatures to kill parasites. Their rationale is that farm fish eat pellets that are heat-treated to kill parasites. However, farm salmon are exposed to all the wild species living in and around their farms. There is a free exchange of parasites and bacteria between them, and farm salmon eat some of those wild fish too, ingesting their parasite load. A large percentage of BC farm salmon are infected with a bacteria, Tenacibaculum, which causes them to get a condition called mouthrot. People who eat farm fish sushi in British Columbia are eating that fresh from the pens.
One of my best Atlantic salmon samples came from an eagle that grabbed a dead farm salmon out of a mort tote on a farm off Port Hardy. The fish was heavy for the bird, which caused it to fly low over the water as I followed in a friend’s boat. As soon as the eagle got to shore, it got into a fight with another bird over the fish. They slashed and tore at the dead fish, screaming at each other, and then the fish slipped out of their talons, hit the beach rocks and slid into the ocean, where it sank. Anissa leapt off the boat onto the rock where the fish hit and collected the heart, a gill arch and part of its liver. Thanks, eagle! This sample was PRV-positive, as was nearly every Atlantic salmon we tested.
In December 2013, my research group published the first paper reporting on the presence of PRV in British Columbia, based on evidence from samples we’d gathered, in Virology Journal: “Whole-genome analysis of piscine reovirus (PRV) shows PRV represents a new genus in family Reoviridae and its genome segment S1 sequences group it into two separate sub-genotypes.”
While we’d only sequenced fragments of the ISA virus, our team was able to sequence the entire genetics of PRV. Unlike ISAV, PRV is a very durable virus and doesn’t break up into pieces in fish that have been dead for several days, such as those I purchased in the markets. PRV is also quite resistant to temperature change; we found the intact virus in farm fish dead in a tote sitting on a dock in the heat of summer. Having its whole sequence allowed us to not only confirm that this was PRV, but also trace where it came from. When the lab entered the genetic sequence we found in BC fish into the international virus registry, GenBank, it matched a PRV sample taken from a farm salmon suffering from the HSMI disease in Lofoten, Norway. It was like running a fingerprint match.
Interestingly, when a virus travels beyond its home community—in this case from Norway to British Columbia—its genetic sequence changes slightly over time through gradual mutation. Virologists describe this record of mutation as a genetic clock; comparing the BC and Norwegian sequences of PRV in GenBank allowed virologists to roughly estimate how long the virus we found had been outside Norway. While the Norwegian virus had gone on to mutate in the more than 900 salmon farms in Norway, the strain in BC appeared to be the PRV strain that occurred in Norway at the beginning of that country’s outbreak.
In 2013 when we published this result, few people in the province had heard of PRV. In preparation for the publication of our results, I raised money on GoFundMe to send Twyla, who was heavily pregnant, to Norway to film experts there describing the impact of the virus. The Norwegian researchers were very open about their findings in the interviews they gave her, including Dr. Nylund, who said, “It is always a cause for concern when you move a virus from one ocean to another.” Others described how, as the viral load increased in fish, so did the damage to the fish’s organs. I posted Twyla’s short video, Asking Norway, on social media and included it in the press release we put out when the paper appeared.
While there was almost no response from people concerned with the state of wild salmon stocks about this spreading epidemic from Norway—the information was too new to them—a group of government and Marine Harvest scientists collaborated on a paper in the journal PLOS ONE that disputed our findings, saying they had “ruled out” a recent introduction of PRV to British Columbia. We contacted the journal and presented the evidence that neither government nor the industry had actually ruled out the possibility that PRV had been introduced recently to the province, and eleven months later they had to publish a correction: “After careful reconsideration, the authors feel this conclusion is overstated.” And we were also able to publish a formal comment presenting further evidence that PRV is exotic to British Columbia.
In the ongoing war over the impact of salmon farming, no one who disputes my science ever brings up this correction. Government and industry instead refer to the finding in a paper Dr. Marty published in 2014 in the Journal of Fish Diseases, reporting PRV in a steelhead captured in 1977 that had been preserved in paraffin by DFO. Dr. Marty argued that the presence of the virus in the steelhead demonstrated that PRV was in the province before the salmon farming industry began. He did not provide a genetic sequence to corroborate his claim, and that sample tested negative in future retesting ordered by the court during one of my lawsuits.
Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, government and industry scientists and their PR teams kept repeating that there is a local, endemic strain of PRV in British Columbia and that it is harmless. At the time of this writing, they still have no proof of such a strain and they do not address the finding of a Norwegian strain. But by claiming that the PRV in the province is a local, harmless virus, they are able to carry on legally transferring Atlantic salmon infected with PRV to the farms. Section 56 (b) of Canada’s Fishery (General) Regulations prohibits DFO from issuing a transfer permit for any fish infected with a “disease agent” into the marine waters of Canada; if PRV is harmless, it is not a “disease agent.”
When science runs counter to government policy, there seems to be nothing you can do to have it acknowledged. But when science supports such policy, there is nothing you can do to stop it from being misused. When I am accused in the media of irrational bias against the salmon farming industry—or fearmongering, as it is sometimes called—all I can say is that I don’t wake up every morning with a blank slate. My views are the sum of my experience. I have nothing against aquaculture, but it is clear from decades of research that wild salmon are not surviving exposure to the unnatural levels of pathogens that pour out of marine salmon feedlots. Nothing in wild salmon’s evolution has prepared the fish for immersion in the effluent stream from salmon farms. The federal government’s consistent failure to legislate a sealed pathogen barrier between wild and farm salmon has made this situation much worse. The 2016 paper that Dr. Marty published in collaboration with Marine Harvest and DFO with the subtitle “Western North American PRV fails to cause HSMI” provided government with the science it needed to allow the heavily infected salmon farming industry to continue. If there was no disease, no one was breaking a law and no one had to enforce that law; it didn’t matter that other DFO and international scientists were saying the opposite.
I knew there would be a lot of emails going back and forth between government and industry on this subject, so I began filing more access to information requests. It was easy. I simply went to the government website, identified the department, topic, dates and people involved, paid five dollars, clicked send and waited. Thousands of pages of emails arrived on disks in the mail. Each page had been scrutinized, and thick lines blacked out any material deemed sensitive or a privacy concern. But it was not hard to piece together that much of what was being said inside government was profoundly disturbing. The bureaucracy in DFO and the CFIA seem heavily invested in hiding things they know the public is not going to like about salmon farming.
In early January 2017, I was reading through another package of DFO communications about PRV when I came across a series of emails Dr. Marty had written the year before, in which he pulled the rug out from under himself. Despite having published a paper with Marine Harvest reporting that PRV failed to cause HSMI in British Columbia, he’d written emails a few months later that appeared to say the opposite. I’m going to quote directly from one dated May 21, 2016, sent by Dr. Marty to Pacific Salmon Foundation veterinarian Dr. Emiliano Di Cicco: “In February 2008, [redacted] provided BC vets a continuing education session…. When she showed images of HSMI, I immediately recognized the lesions as similar to what I had been seeing microscopically in some BC fish. However, the aquaculture veterinarians said that they were not seeing a clinical pattern that was consistent with Norwegian HSMI (all the Atlantic salmon companies have Norwegian connections, so I assume that they are well aware of the clinical signs of HSMI). Therefore we decided that what I was seeing was probably not the same as Norwegian HSMI.”
I stared at this a long time. “I immediately recognized the lesions as similar to what I had been seeing microscopically in some BC fish.” It appeared to me that four months after Dr. Marty published a paper stating HSMI had never been found in North America, he was now saying that it does occur, that he had found it himself eight years earlier but had decided at the time that it wasn’t HSMI because the fish farm industry’s veterinarians told him it wasn’t.
Dr. Marty didn’t stop there. On May 23, 2016, he wrote an email to Dr. Kristi Miller: “I do not want the SSHI [Dr. Miller’s research team] to be seen as a project that takes credit for discoveries that were previously reported by other scientists…. Microscopic features of the 2013 outbreak reported by DFO last Friday [in a paper by Miller] were first reported publicly by another researcher (me) in 2013.” Was this the reason for his stunning reversal of opinion on the existence of HSMI in BC farm salmon—he didn’t want anyone taking his credit?
Two pieces of information clicked together like the halves of the stone tool Billy Proctor had found. When Dr. Gary Marty had reported the HSMI lesions to the fish farm company Mainstream in 2008, the company told him it was not HSMI, and that was the last time he reported any signs of the virus. Yet now, internally, at least, he was suggesting it had indeed been HSMI and that he continued to observe these lesions in farm salmon.
In December 2017, eleven months after I found these emails, I wrote to Dr. Marty asking if he had seen HSMI in BC salmon. He answered that he’d seen heart lesions that were “HSMI-like.” I wrote again to ask him what the difference was between “HSMI” and “HSMI-like.” Dr. Marty said I would have to pay his lab $150 an hour to receive his answer, and he sent me a link that allowed me to make a formal request. I made the request. On January 26, 2018, I received Dr. Marty’s response: “There is no difference.” He said he sent the samples for a second opinion to Norwegian scientists and they said the lesions in the BC salmon were within the range of what they would diagnose as HSMI. He billed me $275.63.
If my name was on a scientific paper stating that HSMI had never been found in British Columbia and one of my co-authors started saying that actually he had found it and now wanted credit for that discovery, I would take this up with all my co-authors, contact the journal, tell them we had made a serious error and ask that the paper be retracted, or at the very least amended. Instead, none of the co-authors blinked. This paper remains a pillar in DFO’s legal defence that PRV is not a disease agent, meaning that salmon infected with it can, legally, be transferred into marine pens. I also contacted the journal, PLOS ONE. A year later, I was told the journal was still investigating.
Meanwhile, Dr. Kristi Miller was learning about how PRV interacts with Pacific salmon. In 2011, Creative Salmon, which operates in Tla-o-qui-aht territory off Tofino on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island, called her. They are a small company owned by Japanese interests and the only one to continue farming chinook on the BC coast. Many of the chinook salmon in their farms were turning yellow and dying, and they wanted to know why.
Miller’s tests quickly homed in on PRV as a potential cause. Then, in collaboration with Dr. Emiliano Di Cicco, she and her team learned that when the virus enters the red blood cells in chinook, the virus uses the cell to make so many copies of itself that the cells rupture en masse. The hemoglobin explosion from the ruptured blood cells overwhelms the fish’s liver, causing jaundice, which turns the fish yellow, then causes organ failure and death.
Among the internal documents I was reading, I found a comment by Miller that a pathologist with the Province of British Columbia had advised Creative Salmon not to allow her to publish this work. (She wrote, “the histopathologist from the province convinced the industry not to sign off on the report…if PRV was to be included in the analyses.”) Ah yes, I thought, if Dr. Miller published that PRV was causing chinook salmon cells to explode, PRV would be designated as a “disease agent.” Dr. Marty was a “histopathologist from the province.” It took Miller and Di Cicco seven years to finally get this work published, but they did it. In response, Dr. Hugh Mitchell, an aquaculture veterinarian from eastern Canada told media that Miller and Di Cicco’s work was not science, but “activism” and “fearmongering.” The BC Salmon Farmers Association said Miller’s data did not support her conclusions. None of the critics provided any detail to back up their comments.
In 2013, the same year my research team published our first paper on PRV in British Columbia, I got a tip from an anonymous source saying that Marine Harvest’s Dalrymple Hatchery, just north of Campbell River on Vancouver Island, was infected with PRV and young fish from there were going into a farm off Port Hardy. Farm salmon eggs are incubated in hatcheries on land and the young salmon are reared in freshwater in tanks for up to a year before they are old enough to transition to saltwater.
I wrote to Marine Harvest asking them please not to put fish infected with PRV into their farms. I went to the hatchery, stood in front of its gate and made a short iPhone video that I posted to let people know what was going on. Where were all the fishing organizations, including the union, who had started the fight fifteen years earlier to stop Atlantic salmon from introducing a dangerous virus to our coast? When I contacted these former allies, I got no response.
So I went to Ecojustice, a law firm run as a charitable society that pays lawyers minimal salaries to defend cases important to our environment. They can’t take every case, and I felt very lucky they took mine, which would test the law that prohibits transfer of fish carrying a “disease agent” into the marine waters of Canada, including net pen salmon farms. We soon learned that there were two conflicting regulations in play here. One, section 56 of the Fisheries (General) Regulations, straightforwardly prohibited fish infected with a disease agent from being transferred into the ocean. The other, written into the salmon farm licences, said it was okay to put infected fish into the ocean if the company veterinarian thought the risk of spreading disease was low. Which rule should take precedence in a case like this?
To find out, we sued the minister of fisheries and oceans and Marine Harvest.
It took two years, but in 2015 we won. Federal Court Justice Donald Rennie delivered a blistering decision in which he struck down the part of the licence giving the company the power to make such a decision and he ordered DFO to initiate PRV screening of farm salmon before transfer into the farms. DFO, Cermaq and Marine Harvest appealed this decision, but when Dr. Miller reported that PRV was causing disease, the Department of Justice warned that all parties might want to reconsider their position. They dropped the appeal and took a different path.
Four successive federal ministers of fisheries—Gail Shea (the only Conservative on this list), Hunter Tootoo, Dominic LeBlanc and Jonathan Wilkinson—have so far been convinced that they do not have to implement Justice Rennie’s decision. DFO said that as a result of the ruling it had reconsidered its policy not to screen farm salmon for PRV. But after reconsideration, it reached the same conclusion—that there was not enough scientific evidence to treat PRV as a disease agent—and so it allowed the companies to continue as before. It ignored Miller’s findings.
In response, Ecojustice and I sued the minister of fisheries for a second time. Millions of farm salmon infected with a virus that appeared to be from Norway were still pouring into the waters of the BC coast, and yet the Canadian government allowed the practice to continue. How many wild chinook salmon had experienced massive cell rupture after swimming past salmon farms, and how many Fraser sockeye were getting heart lesions from this virus as other DFO research suggested?
A scientific paper published in 2017 reported that the southern resident orca, already a small population of less than a hundred individuals due to the heavy toll from decades-earlier captures for marine parks, was declining at an alarming rate. In recent years, 69 percent of pregnancies failed to produce live babies as a result of starvation. In 2018, Tahlequah, a young mother whale, carried her stillborn daughter for seventeen days over two thousand kilometres in what was called a “tour of grief.” She was followed by millions of people on social media. Why were these whales too starved to procreate? Researchers identified the steep decline in chinook salmon in the Fraser and nearby Columbia Rivers as the cause of the whales’ decline. Dr. Miller’s work linked PRV with disease and death in chinook salmon; my research found that more salmon were infected with the virus in the lower reaches of the Fraser River than farther upriver, which suggested that PRV-infected wild salmon are having difficulty getting up the river.
Was viral infection why the Indigenous fishermen told me “the fish aren’t moving up the river like they should”? Standing over pools with long-handled nets, they stared into the rushing water for hours waiting for the right moment to scoop up a fish. They grew to recognize individual fish by the scars on their backs and other signs, and they noticed that many fish never left the pool to continue their migration. This is exactly what the Norwegian scientists suggested: PRV-infected wild salmon could be too weak to swim up rivers.
Six years after the Cohen Commission was convened, the 2016 run of Fraser River sockeye was the lowest on record since counting began in 1893. In 2019, the run dropped again, and in 2020 it dropped still further. I was racing a virus our government had given a head start.