Mothership Meanderings: A Preventable Catastrophe

August-September 2001

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Alan Wilson

If you follow this column, you know I often write about the Broughton Archipelago, where we've travelled on our boat and paddled each of the past several summers.

Red Dots = Fish Farms Green Dots = Proposed sites

We love the area for its multitudes of intricate waterways, islets and coves. This is a place of magnificent beauty, isolation, and primal nature.

Paddling is one of the best ways to experience it, drifting silently in shallow waters among forest-topped rocky islets, observing whales, dolphins, shorebirds, eagles, bears and intertidal life.

Paddling is how the original human inhabitants of this area traveled for some 10,000 years until the coming of Europeans brought this flourishing life to the brink of extinction over a hundred years ago.

First Nations are undergoing a cultural revival, trying to recover from that devastating time. But nowadays there is another threat, an attack on the vast pulse of life known as the 'salmon cycle'. That threat is salmon aquaculture.

Salmon farms are not limited to the Broughton, nor do they threaten only that region. But the Broughton has almost 30 farms and, over the past decade, the four tribes that make up the Musgamagw Tsawataineuk Tribal Council have been leaders among First Nations coast-wide in the struggle to get fish farms removed from their territories.

It doesn't take long for the observant paddler or boater to recognize some of the more obvious problems with fish farms and know that these are industrial sites to avoid.

Passing by you'll see a floathouse, a large area enclosed with marker buoys, and the tops of net cages. Sometimes you'll see fish jumping (usually Atlantic salmon, an alien species on our coast). What you often won't see is people: automation has led to fewer jobs, and some farms are 'fallow' in an attempt to recover from fish farm pollution.

With operating farms, you'll hear a lot of noise if they're running automated feeders or pumping water through pens trying to keep algae blooms or disease at bay.

At many farms you'll see banks of intense lights shining all night long, to get farmed salmon to grow faster.

Sometimes you'll hear shots from high-powered rifles used to kill 'predators' such as sea lions, seals and otters. Bullets fired over water can skip, so always give farms a wide berth.

If you're on a bigger boat looking for a spot to anchor, you'll find that fish farms occupy some of the best anchorages. The farms' anchoring cables also occupy a surprisingly large area, so be careful.

But the nuisance impacts of noise, lights, guns and access are only the surface-level problems of fish farms. For First Nations and others dependent on a healthy wild fishery and clean coastal environment, the problems go much deeper.

Several years ago the government held an environmental assessment of the industry called the Salmon Aquaculture Review (SAR). Laurie and I were part of the process, representing the environmental and tourism/recreation sectors respectively.

Flawed as it was, the SAR at least documented some of the problems beneath the surface, such as pollution from fish farms wastes and antibiotics, disruption to marine mammals, disease, and the risks to wild salmon posed by escaped farmed fish. The final 1800-page report had extensive recommendations to improve poor practices.

Since then, much new information has come to light that shows the problems are even worse than the SAR realized. Escaped Atlantic salmon have been found in 79 of BC's rivers and have spawned in at least three of these, something the industry and government said "could never happen". In Scotland and on our own Atlantic coast, Infectious Salmon Anemia has crossed over from farmed fish to wild. In Scotland and Ireland, high levels of sea lice (correlating closely with fish farms) have devastated wild salmon.

Norway has now ordered farms out of 22 of its fjords-but not so BC, where fish farms continue to line the migration routes that wild salmon take to and from their rivers and streams (see map).

During the SAR (and since) we worked alongside First Nations reps, visited their communities and joined them in presentations to government in Victoria-forging a strong alliance. We witnessed the outspoken solidarity of First Nations leaders in opposition to fish farms, despite the seductive offers of big money and jobs for their people.

Over and over, First Nations governments and organizations have declared their opposition to fish farms within their traditional territories and demanded that existing farms be converted to closed containment (resolutions of the BC Aboriginal Fisheries Commission, First Nations Summit, Union of BC Indian Chiefs, Native Brotherhood, Musgamagw Tsawataineuk Tribal Council and others).

While the 1995 moratorium on new farms remains technically in place to this day, loopholes and lax regulation have allowed the industry to vastly increase its production. This quasi-legal expansion almost certainly led to a situation in which, early this summer, sea lice afflicted millions of wild salmon smolts (juveniles) making their way past the fish farms of the Broughton Archipelago to the sea.

Sea lice, a parasite, afflict the salmon farming industry worldwide. Outbreaks on farmed salmon are common and cause high mortality unless medicated with toxic pesticides. Sea lice can occur on wild salmon, but are normally present in low numbers and have seldom been observed in any number on juveniles. Outbreaks like the current one are associated with dense crowding of salmon (as in netcage farms), and sea lice also appear to grow more quickly under night lights used by farms.

Lifetime Broughton resident and fisherman Bill Proctor first observed the infestation on wild salmon near his home on Gilford Island. "I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime, " he wrote. "Fish farms are destroying wild salmon in the Broughton Archipelago."

WaveLength columnist, Alexandra Morton, who lives in the heart of the Broughton, was the lone scientist on the scene at the outbreak and has done heroic, round-the-clock work to document it.

Based on her sampling, she estimates that the sea lice could result in the death of 400,000,000 or more pink salmon smolts, an attack on the very pulse of life of the Broughton. (The lice level on other wild salmon species remains unknown.)

She argues that it's irresponsible not to immediate suspend operations at the farms and remove the infected farmed fish that are serving as hosts for the parasites.

What's so frustrating is remembering the representatives of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on the SAR telling us not to worry, acting as promoters and apologists for the industry, while the industry sat back smugly, refusing to release site-specific disease and drug data. Now the same government department is denying anything unnatural has occurred.

When DFO finally did send a sampling vessel, they caught virtually no salmon. Thus no problem. Fish farmers say it's business as usual.

The sea lice crisis is a preventable ecological catastrophe which may have enormous consequences. In the Broughton, we are witnessing some of the devastation that Ireland and Scotland have seen to their fish.

Wild Pacific salmon are essential to the cycle of life on our coast, feeding the bear, eagle, killer whale and humans. Research has shown that even the great forests of BC's interior are dependent upon the nutrients brought to it by the decaying bodies of the returning salmon.

In the long term, it's obvious that fish farming needs to be moved to land where it can pose no threat to wild fish-something we've been demanding for years.

What can you do? Visit the Broughton, get to know the people there, get more familiar with this issue. But the bottom line is: don't eat farmed fish. It's not good for you, not good for the environment, and not helpful to coastal First Nations.

Many of the companies advertising in this issue run guided kayak trips or can supply kayak, gear and advice for paddling the Broughton. For private trip permissions, call the Musgamagw Tsawataineuk Tribal Council in Alert Bay at 250-974-5516.