Good afternoon. I'll give you a little bit of background about myself and make a few comments that I think are relevant to this issue. I'll keep within the timeframe.
I have a doctorate from McGill University in biological oceanography. I've been teaching in fisheries and aquaculture for about 30 years ad retired from teaching about five or six years ago. I taught in Alert Bay and also in Nanaimo at Vancouver Island University.
My specialties include salmonid culture, salmonid biology, invertebrate biology, shellfish culture, and marine ecology. Regarding sea lice, I've had some field experience in the Broughtons and in the Gulf Islands over about three or four years. I was on the scientific advisory committee of the Pacific Salmon Forum, and I'm currently the director of the Institute for Coastal Research at Vancouver Island University and also a research associate at the Centre for Shellfish Research at VIU.
I want to make some disclaimers. I didn't have much time to prepare for this session--actually, just yesterday. There are some areas where I don't feel that I have expertise, so if there is any question you ask me on which I feel that I'm not up to speed with the literature, or that I feel is out of my area of expertise, I will certainly let you know.
The main point I want to make--and probably you've heard quite a few of these by now--is that a lot of money has been spent on the issue of sea lice, salmon farms, and wild salmon. I've guessed $20 million over the last decade; other people have suggested $30 million or more.
But a lot of this research was aimed at proving or disproving that salmon farms had an effect, via sea lice, on pink salmon populations. Consequently, a lot of the research did not address, in my view, critical areas of knowledge, which we need to resolve this issue.
For example, we really don't know how sea lice, in the infective stage, which is very rare in the plankton, find their host, the pink fry. We know they do, but we don't know how they do, and this is something you have to know, really, for any epidemiological study. It affects the models you would use to describe an infection and it could affect approaches to management.
We still have only a cursory understanding of how the ongoing sea lice infection on the high seas maintains itself. How that's transferred in areas without salmon farms, for example, to young fish, and their inshore and offshore life histories, we don't really know, despite many theories.
Another problem is that the sea lice we have in B.C.--and I know you've heard this before--are probably a different species. Genomics work indicates that they're different, and that stands to reason. Consequently, a lot of the information from research done in Europe over a longer time period can't be used with confidence. We don't know enough about the relative effect of temperature and salinity on our species of sea louse. We don't know enough about the precise interactions between the parasite and the host immune system, and that's very important.
We do know that Pacific salmon have a strong natural resistance to sea lice, and in other words, it's a well-adapted parasite here. But there are many other things we don't know because we're dealing with a new species, and we didn't realize this when this issue began.
Another aspect of the issue that I think you all are probably too well aware of is the rather intense polarization in British Columbia. Science works on debate, and that's fine, but the intensity of the debate here on this issue is very, very high.
It's greater than normal, in my view, and it's very persistent, so much so that we can find highly accomplished scientists on both sides of the issue saying opposite things and disagreeing strongly with each other. This makes it hard for the non-specialists to make a judgment when they are being told completely different things by highly qualified scientists. That's a serious problem.
Another issue that seems very important to me—although I don't know how many scientists would agree with this—is that despite all the research we do in the natural sciences, in biology and oceanography and so forth, it does not seem to solve the issue. We go from one issue to another, because the real question, I think, is whether we should have a salmon farming industry in B.C. at all. Some people feel we should, and some people feel we should not. This is the issue of the social acceptance of salmon farming.
Although all of these issues get expressed as issues of environmental concern and environmental impact, including issues of the negative effects on wild fish, I think the real issues may lie elsewhere, because we never seem to resolve them. No matter how much science we do, the argument is still healthy and alive.
I'd be happy to come back to this later, if you would like, but I think the social sciences may have as many answers for us as the natural sciences, and that's something we haven't really started to get to yet in British Columbia.
I have a couple of basic points to make. I think we were absolutely right to address the sea lice issue when it first arose about a decade ago, because it had already been an issue in Europe for some years.
But the issue here was a political one right from the start, when a large number of sea lice were seen on pink fry by local people in the province after the largest escapement of pink salmon in recorded history. They noticed sea lice on the fish, and then, a year later in 2002, in the return, the population had crashed.
The population went down from about 300 million fish to 50 million fish in one generation. That's an enormous crash. It's not unusual for pink salmon...but this was extreme. So it would be natural to look at sea lice, but sea lice were raised as the issue right off the bat by people living in that area of the province, and by people who had been trying to remove salmon farms from the area for some years.
There are a number of other quite legitimate reasons for the crash in the pink salmon population. For example, we could have too many fry for the food resource available. That's density-dependent mortality. It's a cornerstone of modern ecology and also of fisheries management. The food abundance and the timing of the emergence of the fry might have been out of whack. The fish might have been early or the food late in developing. That's a known phenomenon. Ocean conditions farther out at sea could have had an affect.
I'm not saying that these factors were in operation, but because pink salmon are known to undergo such extreme population variations and crashes throughout their range, long before salmon farms were invented and in places where there are no salmon farms, it would seem that we should have looked to at least some of these alternative hypotheses. Instead, we jumped on sea lice and stayed on sea lice, and these other possibilities have not really had a good examination. That's unfortunate.
The levels of sea lice have been reduced, both on the farms and on wild fry. Since 2005 that seems to have been a bit of a trend. We really can't tell whether this is due to some environmental change, like a lowering of salinity or a change in temperature, but one thing we do know is that the farms are either treated, fallowed, or harvested, or only have smolts before the pink fry come out.
This is an area management program that's been put together by the provincial government and the major salmon farms in the area, and I think it's fair to say that farm management has contained the risk associated with the farms and sea lice and wild fish. In other words, there is a management system now in place that should be able to manage this issue.
I want to mention sockeye, because I've noticed that there's been a lot of suggestion in the media that the declines in the Fraser River sockeye could be caused by sockeye smolts swimming past salmon farms on the Discovery Islands near Campbell River. A lot of the laboratory work done over the last two or three years has shown--while you have to be careful about transferring laboratory results to the field--that pink salmon, which begin at only about 0.2 grams or a fifth of a gram in size when they enter salt water, are vulnerable to sea lice until they get to be about 0.3 or 0.5 or half a gram. Then they develop resistance. By the time they're a gram, they're quite resistant to sea lice.
Sockeye spend an entire year in lakes, sometimes more, before they come to the ocean. They're quite big. They're smolts, not fry. They can be 3 grams or 5 grams in size, so perhaps 25 times larger than a pink fry. They have fully developed skin and scales and they should have a lot more resistance to sea lice, even if they did pick them up by going by a farm. So I think this is a non-issue, and that's a personal opinion.
The final thing I'd like to say is how not to do things. In British Columbia.... Well, let me just back up. It appears that the research done on salmon farms is often targeted at issues of concern to the public. That seems to make sense: you want to be solving issues that are seen to be of concern. We've seen waves of these issues, with sea lice being the most recent and also the longest lasting and probably most intense issue in recent years.
But public concern seems to originate from media coverage. So whoever gets to the media most effectively gets to set the research priorities. Essentially, if you have The Vancouver Sun directing research priorities, it's perhaps not the most ideal thing. In these situations, scientific work, as already noted, becomes polarized in searching for the smoking gun and so forth. There's a lot of time and money spent, wasted on casting blame and on trying to avoid blame, and this is why we did not know some of the key aspects of pink salmon biology and salmon louse biology, or sea lice biology.
If you factor in the time taken by managers and bureaucrats in dealing with this issue, I don't think we could ever really come up with a good estimate of how much the issue of sea lice has cost us—and we still don't know all that we need to know. Many less charismatic issues become neglected and money gets spent on something that has essentially been promoted by the media or people who have effectively reached the media.
So we need a new approach. I don't know what it is. I think some creative thinking needs to be done. Again, the social sciences may offer us some ways out.
That concludes my comments.
:
I'm going to take an approach that is slightly different from Bill's.
Hi, Bill.
Dr. William Pennell: Hi.
Dr. Brian Harvey: I think it's better for me to just describe who I am, how I got involved in sea lice, and what my expertise is. I've made the assumption that I am here to answer questions and to help when I can with information and, possibly, opinions.
As for who I am, I'm an independent biologist. I have worked independently since getting my Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Victoria. My professional training is in fish physiology in fisheries and has concentrated on the sustainable use of aquatic biodiversity.
I have some familiarity with the biology and problems caused by sea lice because I performed two contracts for the BC Pacific Salmon Forum in 2008 and 2009. I was asked to review the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature for research on the interactions between wild salmon and sea lice produced by the salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago. That was my brief there. I am not a sea lice biologist. I don't have personal and professional experience in regard to doing experiments on sea lice. I did one more contract after that for the salmon forum on the threats to wild salmon in British Columbia, of which sea lice was one among many.
In the first decade of my career, I applied my training mostly to projects on aquatic biodiversity conservation in developing countries and indigenous communities. After about 10 years of that, I formed what I think was a successful--it's still going--Canadian NGO, a non-profit called the World Fisheries Trust, just to apply these research results and things I had done and published, both in Canada and in developing countries. We did a lot of training and community development kinds of things. Along the way, I published four technical books on the conservation of aquatic biological diversity.
In the third decade, I left the World Fisheries Trust to concentrate more on being an independent consultant and a writer. I specialized in two things. I wrote a number of reviews, risk assessments, and policy analyses on fisheries and aquaculture issues for some national and international agencies. Then, wearing my slightly more creative hat, I wrote and published a number of articles, columns, and books on fisheries science and development. These have been written for a general audience.
I published my first real book in 2008, which is called The End of the River . It is about global water management and fisheries and has a lot to do with water management in Brazil.
Some of the places where I've found funding over the years for my projects include the FAO of the United Nations, CIDA, IDRC, Fisheries and Oceans, the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Montreal, and a number of foundations.
I've written quite a lot of risk analyses and biological synopses for DFO. Most of these are on species that are coming under the purview of COSEWIC or are listed aquatic species at risk. A couple of those that were fairly high profile were the Cultus Lake sockeye and the Nooksack dace, which is an obscure little fish but has quite a political history.
I've been doing sustainable fisheries and biodiversity conservation in Canada, southeast Asia, and Latin America for about 25 years. At one point I led quite a long-term campaign for preserving salmon genetic diversity, so I'm quite familiar with many of the salmon problems in British Columbia.
I've organized and chaired numerous international conferences and workshops on aquatic biodiversity and advised the federal and provincial governments on some of these issues, as well as first nations. I've done quite a lot of work with first nations, including the Shuswap in British Columbia, the Nuu-chah-nulth, which is a collection of nations, the Musqueam, the Carrier-Sekani, and the Sliammon.
As for what I do now, I'm a consultant and a writer. In the consulting, I concentrate on these aquatic biodiversity and policy issues.
:
As I understand it, you'd like me to comment on whether sea lice is just one of the factors that could be causing problems for pink salmon; I'm just saying “pink salmon” because that's really the only one on which much work has been done.
Let's put it this way. My opinion and what most scientists are writing in their research papers are the same, which is that there are many threats to salmon. Many of them interact. We don't know quite how the interactions work, but of course you would not be a good biologist if you didn't acknowledge the fact that usually these things are a combination of factors. There are an awful lot of things that have been shown to affect salmon populations.
In the United States, for example, they have a slightly different situation with their salmon, and they have what they call the “four Hs”. Let me see if I can remember: harvest, hatcheries, and hydro power. What's the other one? It's habitat, of course. It's loss of habitat.
It's a little bit different here in B.C. We don't have the big hydro-power developments they have. But on the other ones, as well as things like climate change and contaminants that come floating across in clouds from smelters in Asia, those kinds of things have all been shown to affect population strength in salmon. It's highly unlikely that it's only one thing. Again, the great thing about the precautionary principle is that it says there might be 10 different things, but that doesn't do us much good when we're trying to create policy here or trying to make legislation.
By the way, I really do see your point of view about having to rely on a bunch of waffling experts who are trying to protect their positions. I do see your point of view. I do try to write for the public, to make it intelligible and strip all the jargon out, but the precautionary principle also says there might be 10 different things that are causing a problem. Which ones can you actually do something about?
In this case, there are things that can be done about harvest. There are things that can be done about some of the hatchery effects on wild salmon. There are some things that can be done to give them back some habitat. There's not much we can do about climate change in the timeframe that will affect salmon--and it definitely will--but there are also things that can be done about sea lice.
If we suspect that the harvest is a problem, we cut down on the harvest. We may not be able to actually prove that, strange as that may sound. It's not as cut and dried as that, but we suspect it pretty strongly, so we'll cut down on the harvest.
If we suspect strongly that sea lice are a problem, we'll do something about them. I believe that's happening with the kind of integrated management that Bill Pennell has referred to.
So really, I don't have an opinion that's any different from what most scientists are saying. We live in an ecosytem. There are all kinds of influences on them, and yes, there are a lot of things that are damaging to salmon. Sea lice is one of them. It may be one that we can do something about more easily than we can for some of the others.
:
My name is Martin Krkosek. I'm currently a research associate at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington.
I've been working on the sea lice and salmon issue for just over eight years now. I received my doctorate from the University of Alberta for work that I did on this issue two and a half years ago. I've received numerous awards for that work, including a Governor General's gold medal. I've written approximately 20 papers on this topic over the years, including some of the most significant papers in the top journals that have received a large proportion of the media interest on this issue.
I'd like to thank you for having me here. It's an honour to come here and be able to communicate with you on this issue. I have prepared a briefing document for you. Unfortunately there's no French translation at the moment, but it should be forthcoming.
I agree with most of what my colleagues said in the previous hour. I'd say there's been a large focus on what we do not know about this issue and not so much of a focus on what we do know about this issue, and I'd like to speak to that a little bit.
Four key questions are at the heart of this issue, and I've been working on those questions. The first one is whether sea lice spread from salmon farms to wild salmon. Second, if they do, what's the impact on individual fish in terms of their behaviour and in terms of their survival? Third, if infestations are recurrent, what's the effect on the populations of wild salmon that are affected? Finally, if all this amounts to a problem, what are the management solutions that can be implemented, if any? I've been working on all these questions over the last eight years.
The first question is whether sea lice spread from salmon farms to wild salmon. I think there's an overwhelming amount of evidence to indicate that they do. Salmon farms are not the only source of sea lice in the environment; in fact, sea lice are a natural parasite, and they were here long before the salmon farms were here. What's different is the point in time when transmission happens and the magnitude of that transmission.
In the absence of salmon farms, when juvenile salmon leave the rivers and lakes and enter the nearshore marine environment, they do so in the spring, in March, April, May, and June. During this period there are very few natural hosts for sea lice in the nearshore environment. Most of the hosts are offshore; they're adult salmon, and they're out there on their feeding migration. It's not until summertime, in July or August, that large populations of wild salmon return to the coast and bring sea lice with them. This means that there's about a three- to four-month window between the time juvenile salmon enter the ocean and the time they first encounter sea lice. It's during this period that they're smallest and most vulnerable to infection.
There is a key difference when salmon farms are in the water. They provide a very large host population for sea lice during the winter, so when juvenile salmon enter the nearshore marine waters, they encounter salmon farms that host several million domesticated hosts in a region like the Broughton Archipelago, and those hosts support a large parasite population. When the juvenile salmon enter the ocean, they encounter those parasites, and they're poorly equipped to handle them. That is where the concern is: the effect of sea lice on the very small juvenile stages of salmon during their first few months of marine life.
What we've learned is that in areas without salmon farms, the natural prevalence of infection is about 5% on juvenile salmon during this stage of their life. In areas with salmon farms, the prevalence has a wide range, but it's generally higher than that, and in some instances can reach 90%, 95%, 100%. There is sometimes a very high mortality associated with very high infestations.
You don't have to be a mathematician to figure it out. I've been in the field studying this for about six months of the year for the last eight years, and you can see it happening.
The effect of the sea lice on the juvenile salmon can be direct mortality. One adult louse on the smallest salmon is lethal. The more common situation is two or three lice on a medium-sized juvenile salmon, and there, the interactions are much more subtle. There will more likely be sublethal effects that make the fish more prone to, primarily, predators or diseases. It's probably there that mortality happens. The lice change the behaviour of the juvenile salmon in ways that make them more prone to predators. So in reality, in the ocean, long before a louse would kill a fish, a predator would kill that fish because of the infection that was there in the first place.
There was a period of about five years when we had recurrent, very large, sea lice infestations of juvenile salmon in the Broughton Archipelago. Those were the infestations that triggered this issue. During that time, we observed very high mortality among the juvenile salmon. Using standard fisheries and epidemiological tools, we were able to isolate the effect of sea lice from numerous other confounding factors and identified that as a major factor affecting the productivity of wild pink salmon populations in the Broughton Archipelago. During that period of infestation, the productivity was negatively affected so much that the populations were at risk of local extinction.
Since then, we've seen major changes in management. It has moved from a focus on protecting the productivity of the farms to a focus on protecting wild salmon from sea lice. It's a coordinated area management plan; most of this work is still focused on the Broughton Archipelago.
During the spring, when the juvenile salmon migrate out to sea, about half the farms are emptied or are treated with chemical parasiticides to bring the lice numbers down as low as possible during that out-migration season. Preliminary results indicate that this management plan is working. The number of lice on the farms and on the wild salmon have declined dramatically in recent years.
As scientists, with the models we're using, we would predict that this should result in the recovery of those populations. The predictions we made in the past, when we were expecting to see local extinction because of sea lice infestations, now no longer hold. The sea lice infestations have been largely eliminated from the Broughton Archipelago because of this change in management.
The change in management is largely reliant on the use of chemical parasiticides, and this is a situation that is, I think, a little bit tenuous. First, one reason is that the chemicals could have adverse effects on the aquatic ecosystem. This is toxic to crustaceans. That includes shrimp, prawns, crab, and the copepods in the zooplankton that are a key component of the food web. To date, no one has done any work to evaluate what the ecological effects of these chemicals are.
Another tenuous aspect of the use of these chemicals is the possibility that sea lice will evolve resistance to these chemicals. This is an outcome that has already happened in New Brunswick, Norway, and Chile. Based on our experiences in these other areas, we would expect a similar outcome in British Columbia, although that outcome may be slower.
However, this last winter, we had our first evidence that Slice treatment--emamectin benzoate, known as Slice, which is what is used--failed in one area of British Columbia, Nootka Sound, and this suggests that sea lice may already be evolving resistance to the chemicals used in British Columbia.
However, it's not the only explanation. Other explanations are also possible, such as that the dosage was incorrect or that the salmon were not feeding well and did not receive the correct dosage. No one has done the work yet to determine whether sea lice have evolved chemical resistance in British Columbia.
So far, most of the work in British Columbia has been focused on pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, and that's where we have made our largest advances in understanding the science of sea lice and salmon and in understanding the effectiveness of new management.
I would like to point out, though, that in all major salmon-farming regions of British Columbia, primarily the Discovery Islands, the Broughton Archipelago, and Clayoquot Sound, we have the same patterns of sea lice infestation and population decline of wild salmon. This includes pink salmon, chum salmon, coho salmon, chinook salmon, and sockeye salmon.
It's likely that the problems we've seen in the Broughton Archipelago are widespread. However, it's also likely that there are management solutions that can deal with this. Those management solutions depend on the long-term sustainability of the chemicals that are used to control sea lice on farms.
:
To answer your first question, my level of confidence in believing that sea lice are a problem for wild salmon comes from working on this issue for eight years. I spend about half my time in the field catching fish, counting sea lice, and doing experiments on the effects of sea lice on juvenile salmon behaviour and survival. I spend the other half of my time analyzing those data and working with mathematical models that tell us the implications of what we're learning.
During that time, I also read the literature. The convergence of evidence would be one where sea lice are a contributing factor to a decline of the wild salmon populations. As for where my colleagues differ, I think the main argument is that they're not the only factor. I would agree with that as well. Numerous factors affect salmon populations. Some of them we've known about for a long time.
I would say that sea lice are a new factor, and that does contribute to the productivity of wild salmon populations. What we've learned from the European experience and in British Columbia is that they can be a major factor affecting salmon populations. It takes time in the scientific community to look at new results like this and time for independent people to do their own work and reach consensus. We're in that stage where these are pretty new results, especially in British Columbia.
But the overwhelming weight of evidence from my assessment, from the literature and from the work that I've done, is that sea lice from salmon farms are a major problem for wild salmon populations. It's not only my work; a lot of other people have arrived at the same conclusions. But it's also a problem that is amendable to management change and management solutions.
The second question is about tolerance of sea lice to Slice. The first possible indications that this is happening in British Columbia come from Nootka Sound, from this winter, where there was a failure of treatment on one or more farms in that area where treatment with the chemical was made. The subsequent decline that we usually see in the sea lice populations on the farms was only small, and the sea lice populations rebounded very quickly after that. Those are the telltale signs of resistance to a chemical.
However, this is all anecdotal, and neither I nor anyone else has done the work with those lice from that area to determine whether or not tolerance has evolved.
Let's move to the next question. That work is being done by the centre for aquatic animal health, based in Campbell River, and I believe they're working not with the sea lice from Nootka Sound but with sea lice from other areas. The way they do it is to expose the sea lice to different concentrations of the chemical, and they determine the concentration that causes 50% mortality in the lice. That's called an LD50, and they look to see how that concentration at the LD50changes. As the lice evolve resistance, it takes more and more Slice to kill them.
Do I have time to address the final question about the management solutions?