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INTERVIEW
TRANSCRIPT - Alexandra Morton
I've been here for 18 years, and I came here to study the top predator, which is the killer whale, the Orca. When you study the top predator, as a biologist, you become very aware of the whole food chain underneath. What I am seeing is warning signs flashing at all different trophic layers, the plankton, the salmon, and the killer whales. The whales are gone; they were the first things to leave. It's very obvious to me, and while my expertise was not bacteria, viruses and parasites, it has become that in the last few years.
I actually just started this on a lark. I thought I'm going to count how many Atlantic salmon the commercial fisherman are catching and compare that number with the Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans count. I hounded the guys. I called them on the radio; I went up to their boats. In 17 days, I recorded that over 10,000 fish were caught. I opened up 700 of them, and in some locations, 24%, a quarter of those fish, were eating wild food. This wild food included herring and salmon. That tells me that Atlantic salmon are feeding, which is essential for their survival and colonization, but they're also competing with the wild salmon by eating herring, and they are predator to our wild salmon by eating the young salmon themselves. Those two things right there give you some warning. But, you've got to look at the role of the Atlantic salmon in the Atlantic. That's the only salmon. There is one Atlantic salmon, that's it. Here, we have 5 different species, and some would argue 6. They have this amazingly intricate dance of who goes into the river when, and what type of gravel they use. They've learned to maximize every square inch of our rivers of all different types. Aggressive species like the Atlantic displace other competitors, and that's why it's the only species of salmon in the Atlantic. You throw that into a fine-tuned system like we have here, and that is literally like throwing a wrench into the gears. Parts are going to fly out all over; you couldn't even predict where they will land.
There are all kinds of problems. When the salmon go into the river there are lots of behaviors that are happening between the different species, and the Pacific salmon keep the fights in the family. The Chinook attacks the Chinook and the Coho attacks the Coho. But, the Atlantics have this behavior where they're more likely to attack a different species than their own. They get into the spawning grounds and they disrupt, if they do find a female to take over, her eggs will become useless and lost. There's a big problem in a lot of our rivers where the habitat's now wide open and ready for invasion. Government and industry have told me over and over we tried to introduce Atlantics back in the 30's, the 20's, and the 40's. That was a whole different situation. They were putting, little fish into rivers that were already full of Pacific fish. Now, we have Atlantics that have been in the Pacific for several generations, they're escaping as full-grown fish. All they have to do is make it into a river and spawn, and they're doing that. I mean, Dr. Volpe has found that out. There are several generations of wild spawned Atlantics already in the creeks. If you were concerned about our wild salmon, you would never let this species invade.
They tell me this is the heaviest fish farmed area in the world, and I wonder how in the heck I ended up here. There are 30 right in this 100 square mile area. They're in small narrow channels. So the effect of them is condensed and channeled. The term risk is going to mean something different to the person who is invested in wild salmon vs. farmed salmon. When they say there is no risk, they mean there is no risk to their own fish. They don't mean there's no risk to the wild fish, because all over the world, this lesson gets hammered into us again and again; the rabbits in Australia, the zebra mussel and on and on. Invasions of exotic species are costing the American public millions of dollars to try and deal with. We're thinking, no, it's not going to be a problem this time. But, there's no evidence that it won't be a problem.
No, it often
sounds like a good solution, but while Atlantics are likely to be
a problem, domestic Pacifics are guaranteed to be a problem. They
have experienced this in Norway, and in Scotland, and in places
where they have wild Atlantics, and the farmed
One of the biggest concerns for me with the escapes is that you've now got a fish that was raised on a farm and has undergone the husbandry procedures of that farm, which includes vaccination from different viruses, exposure to different bacteria, and application of pesticides. That animal can now swim free and go right into the nursery grounds of the Pacific carrying whatever they were dealing with on the farm. Now, furunculosis and bacterial kidney disease are caused by very deadly bacteria to both the Atlantics and the Pacifics, but when you treat an Atlantic with antibiotics he can often survive, but he remains contagious. So then you've got this messenger taking bacteria right into the place that the wild salmon are most susceptible. They're a real disease factor.
They're right. If they want to avoid these diseases they should put their farms on land, it would be beneficial to their fish too. If you stand on a football field with a person with a cold, you're less likely to get that cold than if you stand in an elevator for 4 hours with 10 other people who are very sick with the same cold. That's the principle. When the wild fish go by it passes the pathogen to the farm, it multiplies, and the nets prevent any predators from taking these sick fish out. We almost never see sick wild fish because they're grabbed. The seals, the whales, the birds, and the sharks get them. So that pathogen is at the end of its role. But, in the farm situation, they're coddled, they're drugged, they're protected. In the words of a Norwegian scientist, the salmon farms are pathogen-culturing facilities. They get it from the wild, but then they amplify it. And this is the real problem we're seeing here. They've all got orange helmets on. This is quite an operation; they've got boxes of something.
No, they're not even looking at us. These guys are dressed in contamination gear. They got boxes of something that must've come in on the plane. They're going to knock those fish out. They're going to do something to them, but they've strung a tarp so we can't see.
In February, the farm right across the channel put smolts in the water that they had to kill because they were infected with IHN. Now, they told us they got this from sockeye salmon, but in February there are no sockeye salmon here, there's not even a run of sockeye salmon in the fall here. So nobody could accept that explanation. Then, they started to say the herring brought it in, but nobody had traced any IHN to the herring here. It was just a total guess. They killed all 1.5 million of that farm full of young fish. Before they did that, because they left them in the water for 3 months, this farm, just across the channel, suddenly had IHN. These fish were older. The fish farm company decided to try and grow them out. They have lots of lawsuits; they have mort tubs sitting there. They're throwing the losses in every single day, but they have just enough left that they're hoping to be able to harvest them for human consumption. Now, IHN is very similar to rabies. It's a fish form of rabies. It's killed by heat, so when it gets into a mammalian body they tell us it will die. But, as we all know, viruses mutate so personally I would not eat those fish, and I would not eat any farmed fish because I see what goes on here. Beyond that, IHN is very contagious. They don't want any boats to go near, thinking it will stick to our hulls. Meanwhile, all the little pink salmon, the Coho and the Chinook are pouring past this farm because it's located right in the place those fish like to school and stay. The transmission potential to the wild fish is huge. Yes, this is a normal disease, came from the wild originally, but it was not sitting in 100,000 fish at this site ever before, and that is what is different.
I don't really know because the fish farmers won't let me get too close. They use lights on their pens at night. Now, using lights has been banned from the commercial fisheries, because the same boats that used to use lights caught everything: octopus, sharks, and herring. They caught everything they were looking for, but they caught the whole food chain too. The fishermen that live in my community think that the lights on these farms are attracting everything, the herring, the predators, and they upset the whole balance of nature. Where things are normally spread out more at night, they're condensing. They think there's a lot of interaction just between the wild fish. That's unnatural. Also, people that have been on farms have told me they see the young salmon go right through the nets, like you saw with the herring. I collected lots of young salmon near fish farms. I've looked at about 2000 young wild fish, and a lot of them have parallel lines down their bodies. Something salmon-sized has bitten a lot of these fish. There's a lot of interaction going on. But, because I'm not allowed on the farms, I don't really know.
Yes, it can be transmitted to herring, we have huge herring runs in here, and they're really essential for this whole ecosystem. Also, lots of the fish that just remain in one place are the shine or perch and tube snouts. They haven't looked at the whole gamut of species. Not very much is known because it hasn't been a problem before.
This Birdwood Sound farm was one of my sample sites in my study on sea lice over the last 2 years. The first year that I ran into the lice problem I checked the whole area and found lice on fish throughout. I found less when I got further away from the farms. This year I picked 3 sites near farms and 3 sites that were far from farms, and this was one of the sites I checked. The lice situation on this farm and the other 2 were horrific. There's no way in my mind that 90% of the little guys (2.5 to 5 cm long) that are caught next to this farm survive more than a few days after, because they were so heavily infected with lice.
Yes, almost no research has been done on this species of salmon louse as it's called in the Pacific because it's never been a problem before. In the Atlantic, they've done a lot of work because wherever there are salmon farms; the wild fish are dying of lice. There they've come up with a number of 1.6 lice per gram of the fish's weight kills it. The young Atlantics come out of the river at about 7 inches, as opposed to our little pinks and chums that come out much smaller, I mean they're about 1.5 inches when they first come out, and so the lethal load here might actually be a lot less. But basically if it has 1 louse on it at that age, it will die. These had up to 68 lice per fish!
I didn't know what I was doing when I started studying lice, so I contacted people in Norway and Scotland. They methodically taught me how to make the collections, where to pick my sites, how to analyze all of this, and they're actually working on the papers with me. Under their direction over the last 2 years now I've looked at about 2700 small fish, both in this area and much farther North on the coast. If you go several hundred miles north to Prince Rupert, 550 fish, little, young pink salmon that I looked at there, there was 3 lice only, and it was a different species. You go down to Bella Bella, where there were a couple of fish farms, everything was fine, except in the channel where the fish farms were adjacent to Jackson Powers. You come down into the Broughton Archipelago, and you have to catch a salmon, a baby salmon, shortly after it's come out of the river, and they look fine. But, as soon as you approach the farm, 78% were infected at or above the lethal level. I'm being generous here. So this year, it's just catastrophic. The runs have declined by 99%, but only in the rivers that go by these fish farms. To the North, they are bountiful, they're doing great, there's more coming back than they expected. To the south, they're down a little bit too; those fish are also going by fish farms. Because, they're looking at a much broader, expansive waterway, Johnson Straits, they are not down nearly as much. They're down to maybe a ¼ or a ½ of what they expected. But here, we have less than 1%. We expected 5 million pinks to return, and we didn't even get 30,000. This is hugely significant to this area because the pink salmon go to sea, collect the product of ocean photosynthesis from thousands of square miles and they carry it right back up the river. Unlike most of the other salmon species, the adults die, their bodies feed the river and their babies come out of the gravel and go straight to sea. They don't feed in the river at all. So all the wealth of fertilization that the pink salmon bodies have done feeds the baby Chinook, the baby Coho, the baby Steelhead, the trout, and of course the bears. The phosphorus of pink salmon has been found in mountain goats! It's just this amazing surge of protein and nutrients up the hillsides that these fish provide for this area. So without them we have nothing. Until recently, the pink salmon were doing incredibly good.
We know that sea lice are vectors for disease. There's been research in Europe and they've shown that the causative agent for furunculosis has been isolated in lice that are jumping off of the farmed fish. Also a very dangerous virus called Infectious Salmon Anemia is running through Chile, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and New Brunswick, everywhere but here. I'm just waiting for it to show up here. Sea lice can spread that virus. When you have any parasite that is drilled into the flesh, or eating the mucus of one animal and it jumps to another animal, you have a direct vector for that disease to jump. Looking at the number of lice that were all over these fish was one thing that really concerned me. Not only are these young pink salmon covered with lice, they're bleeding from the gills, from the eyeballs, and in the base of their fins. These are classic fish disease symptoms, and I'm not a fish pathologist, but there's something else going on here in addition to the lice. I just haven't had the wherewithal to figure out what it is.
No, it's not, because we watch the debris in here, the logs and all that, and none of it ever gets out. It just goes back and forth with these tides. We've got the pressure of the rivers coming out and the force of the Pacific coming in, and it holds everything in here. I was astounded with the sea lice issue where you can actually see the damage; it's not like a virus where it's much harder to find. In the range beyond the farm, you found sea lice that were up to 10 miles away from the farm. The only thing that would have worked in here was maybe to have 5 farms total, and a much lower density of fish. They should try to meet the natural laws under which fish have survived here over eons, which is a lower density. I pleaded strongly with the government; make this a corporation archipelago, because there's not room for 2 of them. Of course, they didn't listen. The other thing I argued for going back 12 years now was to keep one migration route for the wild fish open. If you have a problem, like we're seeing right now, only 1/2 the rivers would be dead. What we're facing right now is right from Kingcom Inlet and all of Tribune Channel. All of our rivers are stricken. Unless these salmon farms are off the migration routes of the young fish by this spring, that's it, they're toast. They just will not come back. And that's what the fishery managers tell me. People whose whole lives are based on raising pink salmon, they say, when you lose your pink salmon run, you have lost it. Just putting a farm a little distance from a river is not enough.
This is not a scientific decision. This is a political decision. The way I see it, the politicians of British Columbia have trouble negotiating for the wild salmon. The reason for that is the wild salmon need the watersheds, they need the coastal waters, and they need the open ocean. That means your average politician has to say no to the loggers, no to the miners, no to the people who want to put dams in the river, and no the ones that want to divert water down to the United States. They have to negotiate with the United States and the open Pacific stocks, and they're just saying 'to heck with it.' Here we've got a salmon that doesn't need the watersheds and doesn't go to sea. We can have our salmon, and wreck the place too. You know, for years, I could not understand the decision process that was going on here. They came into my community and they said, tell us where you don't want fish farms; we won't put them there. The commercial fishermen and the sport fishermen of this area said 'no, we're not going to participate in that process.' I said, 'you guys, this is it, this is your last chance, tell them.' So, for whatever reason they went out and they showed them on charts where the wild salmon like to be. The government made a chart of the area and they had red, yellow, and green. The definition of a red zone, they said, would not even accept an application for a fish farm. We looked at the map and we'd lost some, we'd won some but most of the people felt pretty good about it, because all the wild salmon migration routes were protected. Within 2 years, there were more salmon farms in the red zones than there were anywhere else. It was such a betrayal of public trust to steal these people's knowledge about where the wild fish are and then they put the salmon farms right there, because they new that those were the most bioproductive areas in the whole area. That's why we're having the severe problems we're having now.
I'm appalled by that kind of thinking, because the wild salmon are not going extinct on this coast. That is a myth that DFO is trying to perpetuate. The sockeye salmon were a pound and half more in weight this year. They came on in numbers that were over the historic numbers. They've never seen so many sockeye in the river right now as they have down in Frazier this year. The pink salmon, until this year, were getting bigger every year and more abundant. Open ocean survival is really favoring salmon right now. We do go through these 'on/off' cycles and it's been recorded through history, but we're in an 'on' cycle right now. The DFO should never be trusted with anything, considering what they did with those East coast stocks. As I understand it, the commercial fishermen were saying the fish are getting smaller, the fish are getting smaller, and what did the DFO do? They invested in these trawlers, the nets were so big it took 2 boats to drag them, and they wiped them out. And you know what they put on the Grand Banks? They put oil wells. That's part of the story here too. You go and you look like you're doing something, but really, you're just letting this fishery be wrecked. Then you get rid of your commercial fishermen who are the only strong voice for the wild fish, and then you can do whatever you want with the corporations. Sure enough there's oil pressure here too. They want to drill on this whole coastal shelf. To say that the wild fishery is something we can do away with is something that the future generations are really going be angry about, because corporate food production is one big experiment. They think they've mastered those little bugs, but the viruses, the bacteria; they're having a heyday. They love the high densities. Those corporate farmers are breaking the natural laws and releasing these little devils. We are going to be looking at wild food production pretty closely in the coming decades. The pink salmon, in particular, are probably the cleanest protein left on earth because they are a 2-year fish and they feed very low on the trophic level. So, to say were going to allow them to go extinct, I think there should be a world body that just doesn't allow this.
When the salmon farms first approached my community, we thought it was a great idea, and I thought it was a great idea. I thought it would bring more children, because we have a little school that's always threatened with closure. I thought there would be more jobs; I thought there'd be less pressure on the wild fish. I loved the idea that there'd be people throughout this area where I could take shelter in a storm. They were so reasonable at first. The fish farmers came to our elders in our community and said, 'where do you think we should put farms to avoid a problem?' The government sent out these teams and they went and brought us these maps and said, 'show us where you don't want farms, we won't put them there.' It looked great. But then, once they got their feet in here, they just took over. They put the farms wherever they wanted. Whenever there was conflict, it was always the commercial fishermen that lost. They have no children in our school. They don't buy fuel at our gas stop. We don't have any jobs at the moment that are coming from our community to the farms. On these fish farms, I've heard of cases where one person's looking after 2 farms. Farms that are left fallowed are just sitting there unmanned. It has not been an economic boom. We are a community that depends on wild fish. We have sport-fishing lodges, we have commercial fishermen, and we have tourism. All of those things have taken a big hit. Most of the lodges have moved out. People just don't come here. The few that are left are struggling because we have a reputation for having lost our wild fish.
Disposing of the farmed fish that have died and no longer are suitable for human consumption into the ocean environment is such an unenlightened and silly idea. It would be like taking dead chickens and throwing them in on top of the neighbor's pig farm. What's happened is they've thrown these on top of a black cod fishery. Whatever these fish died of is now going to transfer to the black cod community and to whatever fish that are out there. To look at a body of water and think 'this is a place to throw dead things' is really ridiculous. Actually, when you look out over a body of water, it's like looking out over 5 levels of the Serengeti Plain. You've got your shrimp level, pollock level, bottom fish, all your plankton, salmon, and herring. So, what are you going to do? Throw dead stuff in there like it's a trashcan? That is just a recipe for disaster.
That's insane.
It's just biological insanity. If they were in fact towing those
pens from Larsen, or any farm in this area, you are now spreading
the problem. The thing about Johnson Straits is that is the main
highway for all the sockeye, and the pinks and the Chinook and the
Coho and now the chums that are pulsing through to the lower rivers.
I came in here in 1984 following a pod of whales. I'd been looking for a place to study whales year round. This place was perfect. It had whales and it had all the salmon-the full house of predators. I began working year round following the killer whale families through this area. The fish farms started playing underwater sounds to keep seals away. The sounds were designed to actually hurt the seals' ears. As is often the case, prey and predator, the seal and the whale, have the same hearing range and so it was like the door was slammed in their face. They just quit coming. One family after the next would just come in here and turn around and flee. This is a violation of the fisheries act. There's a $100,000 fine every time you make a whale move, or a jail term. I started to leave because all the whales were gone. Up until now, I'd been working closely with the Department of Fisheries & Oceans, because I was in an area they couldn't cover. We did lots of exchange of information. I've co-authored papers with them. But, suddenly when I reported this problem it was like, 'no it can't, it can't be.' But, the whales were gone. So now I study the absence of whales. I thought a lot about moving, since it has derailed my life. I came to study the communication between whales in the wild, which is a fascinating subject. But when they displaced the whales I had to think, 'should I go to Alaska?' I really wish I had gone to Alaska right from the get go, but I felt badly to bail out on the whales. So, trying to make this place habitable for the whales again is my whole purpose here.
They say they're not. They're certainly not using them in my area. The only way you can tell if there's one on is if you have an underwater listening device, which most people don't have. I really don't know the status of them up and down the coast. They're still not outlawed. The farmers can use them if they want.
Escapes are
common here. The escapes that I have actually known about have all
occurred in calm weather. It's never been a storm or boat running
into the nets. It's been their boats backing into it, ripping it
with their propellers. It's been big tides that they just weren't
prepared for. I remember one huge escape right into Johnson Straits.
A fellow had forgotten to put a screen into the packing boat and
the fish had just leaked out. In 2000, when I was surveying the
fishermen, they were catching 200 Atlantic salmon a day in their
nets and they still had the little pellets that they feed them on
the farm. So, we knew these fish were coming out, because the first day of the fishery they had pellets. On the second day of the fishery they had pellets, and the fish farmers said, 'no we don't have a hole.' Then they took a look, and they're like, 'oh excuse me, actually we think we've lost about 30,000 fish.' They didn't even know they had a hole. So, I don't see how anyone could say that it's not a problem, or that it's been solved. Maybe it's been solved since yesterday, but certainly not in the last 2 years. They're losing on average about 40,000 fish per year. They're showing up in the Bering Sea. I did an inventory of Atlantics this year and it's the same story. When I survey all the fishermen, pretty soon you get a couple of epicenters. So, there was an event to the West and they all caught all these big spotted Atlantics. Then, there must have been an event in Johnson Straits, because the farther and farther I went east and interviewed the fishermen, the more and more farmed Pacific salmon there were. These fish were a nightmare. They had Chinook mouths and Coho tails, or Coho mouth and a trout tail. Or, they look like a Chinook, but they were covered in spots. Someone's messing with these guys genetically and I don't know if they've gone public with that. There have been other mysterious genetic mixtures. In 2000, I was collecting the Atlantics off the fishermen. They look like sockeye. In fact, my neighbor said he would eat his shirt if there were no sockeye genetic material in these Atlantic salmon. I have gradually found labs all over the place and I've gotten different samples here and there trying to figure out what they've done with these fish.
I don't know what these are. They appear to be crossbred in some cases between Atlantic and Pacific. For example, one company here has bred all the spots off of their Atlantic salmon and those are the ones that look like sockeye. Nobody knows what these fish are, they don't know if they're a Chinook or a Coho. I don't know if that's done by interbreeding or genetic manipulation. As a matter of fact, every time one of these issues comes up, I don't know anything about it. So, what I do now is I get a problem like the shrimp draggers, they phoned me one day 2 years ago and they said we have extraterrestrial stuck to the eyeballs of our fish. So I've got to check this out. Sure enough, the sole had like palm trees growing out of their eyeballs. Most of the guys had never seen this. One guy said he had seen it once before, that he had seen one fish with it. I get on the Internet, and I find somebody whose whole life is that, whether it's tumors or sea lice or parasites or viruses. Then I say to them, what kind of samples do you need? Then I just go out there and I collect them. In this way, I am trying to shed light on these various issues. When the government and the fish farming industry says there's been no evidence of transfer of disease from the farm fish to the wild, I know that the reason they can say that is because they haven't looked. They have found no evidence because they have not looked for evidence. So, now I've made it my life to try and find that evidence, get it published, hold it up, because I think the public will be shocked when they find out what's in these fish and the impact that they're having on the environment.
The consumer is the only hope for this ecosystem. If they fuel the farmed salmon organism by buying it, then that's what will grow. If they want to fuel the wild system, they need to put their money to the wild fish. Personally, I would never feed one of these things to anybody, my children, anyone I like, even an enemy, for 2 reasons. One, I've cultured bacteria out of these fish that's alarming: E.coli, serratia, enterococcus, and streptococcus. But also, if you look at the phyla of farmed salmon you will notice this road band of white. Well, that's the fat. Everyone on earth today has to really look at where they're getting their fat. Because the toxins with which we've glazed this planet with are binding to the fat molecules, and you want to get your fat from as low on the food chain as you can. So, those white streaks in the fish are warning signs that there's going to be PCBs, there's going to be other toxins, and you want your leaner wild fish that's been feeding out in the open ocean where it's a lot cleaner.
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Alexandra
Morton is a registered professional biologist living in the
heart of the Broughton Archipelago.
Can you speak about the possibility of biological pollution with
regards to disease and sea lice of salmon?