Category Archives: Oceans

Piscine Reovirus Pt. 2: Evolution of a New Salmon Virus

May 16, 2013Fisheries, OceansRay Grigg

Read part 1 of this story here

Strange things can happen when salmon eat chickens. Such a diet is unprecedented and bizarre, a violation of the biological order that has occurred over millions of years of evolutionary history. Nature, it seems, does the unusual when human ingenuity tampers with its traditions. And the consequences can be dire. But this is a complex subject that requires some context — an understanding of details first requires an understanding of principles.

Evolution is not as simple as we thought. Darwin’s theory of natural selection only describes the slow “vertical” transfer of genetic material from parent to offspring used by large animals and plants. But the microbial world of bacteria and viruses also does a “horizontal” transfer of genetic material between similar and different organisms by a non-sexual means. This microbial capability — operating since early life on our planet billions of years ago — is a genetic free-for-all in which DNA is exchanged like goods at a swap-meet. These opportunistic organisms use this genetic process to optimize change in their individual traits and thereby accelerate evolution. Their only requirement is that they be brought together in close proximity.

We’ve already experienced the consequences. Many of our common human diseases have come to us from farmed animals through the horizontal transfer of novel genetic material — thanks to globalization and industrial agriculture, at least 30 have occurred since 1970. So the crowded conditions in poultry or salmon farms provide the perfect combination of density and stress that allows viruses to exchange genetic material with each other. The result can increase their virulence, allow them to infect a new species, or even create an entirely novel version of themselves — in taxonomy, a new genus. Which brings us to salmon and viruses.

The fish in the salmon farm in Norway that first began to exhibit strange symptoms in 1999 were infected with a new disease later identified as heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI). The symptoms were a pale and soft heart muscle, yellowish liver, swollen spleen and other swellings. Infection rates in pens were as high as 20%, with morbidity close to 100%. HSMI was extremely infectious, soon spreading to 417 other salmon farms in Norway, then to facilities in the United Kingdom. Indeed, HSMI was discovered to be so infectious that it threatened wild fish that came in contact with the farms or with infected fish that escaped from them. Tests indicate HSMI has arrived in British Columbia.

PLOS One published a scientific article on July 9, 2010, entitled “Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation of Farmed Salmon is Associated with Infection with Novel Reovirus” (Gustavo Palacios, W. Ian Lipkin, et al.), linking HSMI with this “novel” piscine reovirus (PRV). The article’s Abstract claims to “provide evidence that HSMI is associated with infection with piscine reovirus”, presumably the way AIDS is associated with HIV — one is a full-blown version of the other. The article claims that “PRV is a novel reovirus identified by unbiased high throughput DNA sequencing”, that “PRV is the causative agent for HSMI”, and that “measures must be taken to control PRV not only because it threatens domestic salmon production but also due to the potential for transmission to wild salmon populations.” Indeed, as Veterinary Research (4.06, Apr. 9/12) finds, “PRV is almost ubiquitously present in Atlantic salmon marine farms, and detection of PRV alone does not establish an HSMI diagnosis.”

If PRV is so prevalent and it does develop into HSMI as research suggests, this is a problem for salmon farming. But it strikes terror in those concerned about the health of wild salmon and the ecologies than depend on them. Indeed, PRV and HSMI may already be doing enough damage to be imperilling BC’s wild salmon runs.

The clue to the origin and virulence of the PRV/HSMI virus and disease comes from the PLOS One article and the word “novel”. Two general kinds of the family of “Reoviridae” virus occur in the fauna community. One is an orthoreovirus, which includes both a mammalian and an avian strain. The other is an aquareovirus which is exclusive to aquatic animals. An analysis of the genetic material of the piscine reovirus identifies it as distinctly different from the two general groups, but situates it exactly between them, embodying half the attributes of the avian orthoreovirus and half the attributes of the aquareovirus. In other words, PRV is a new genus, designated GU994015 PRV, that has combined the traits of a bird virus and an aquatic virus. This probably explains why it is so infectious. But how did it become so “novel”?

The answer may be found in the chicken wastes that the salmon farming industry has been adding to its salmon feed — just the conditions that would provide viruses with the perfect opportunity to transfer genetic material horizontally. This would explain how the aquareovirus was able to exchange useful DNA with the avian orthoreovirus to develop a new virulent version of itself to infect fish, manifesting as the novel piscine reovirus and then with the clinical symptoms of HSMI. This suspicion is confirmed by a related article in PubMed (May, 2013) entitled “Piscine reovirus encodes a cytotoxic, non-fusogenic, integral membrane protein and previously unrecognized virion outer-capsid proteins”. According to the article, “Recent sequence-based evidence suggests that PRV is about equally related to members of the genera Orthoreovirus and Aquareovirus.” In other words, PRV seems to be a unique or “novel” virus created by combining the genetic material from two distinctly different viruses, one related to birds and the other related to aquatic animals — the first such amalgamation that has occurred since the divergence of the virus 49 to 52 million years ago (Journal of General Virology, Aug. 2002, vol. 83, no. 8, 1941-1951).

The discoverers of this virus, Gustavo Palacios, W. Ian Lipkin et al., are so confident of the causative relationship between PRV and HSMI that they have applied for a patent on the “immunogenic compositions and methods for inducing an immune response against Piscine reoviruses” (Pub. No.: US 2013/0058968 A1, March 7, 2013).

This preventative option might provide some hope for farmed salmon, but how exactly wild salmon would be immunized is a mystery. And a worrisome sentence occurs in another PLOS One article (June 5/12) entitled, “Atlantic Salmon Reovirus Infection Causes a CD8 T Cell Myocarditis in Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar L.). “The etiology of myocarditis (cause of heart inflammation) in humans remains unknown in most cases but an association with a viral infection has attracted a lot of attention over the years.”

For other related information on piscine reovirus, please go to http://www.youtube.com/embed/ePGoTadmUO0

Piscine Reovirus Pt.1: New Salmon Disease Sweeping the Coast?

May 9, 2013Oceans, Salmon Farming and AquacultureRay Grigg

If the “research” recommendations of the Cohen Commission Report into disappearing Fraser River sockeye are to be implemented, then the study of “pathogens” emanating from net-pen salmon farms would be a useful place to begin. Indeed, Justice Cohen is quite explicit that rigorous testing be undertaken on “the hypothesis that diseases are transmitted from farmed salmon” to wild species (Chapter 4, #68, p. 113B).

This is a fertile area for study. For example, Justice Cohen learned during a special reconvening of his Commission in December, 2011, that infectious salmon anemia (ISAv), is a lethal viral infection in wild salmon linked to the arrival of salmon farms to BC’s West Coast. Had he chosen to reconvene again four months later at the urging of Alexandra Morton, he would also have learned of another debilitating affliction likely brought to the West Coast by the salmon farming industry. A piscine reovirus (PRV), known to cause heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI), is a disease that so weakens wild salmon that they may be unable swim the oceans or migrate to their spawning grounds. Although Justice Cohen didn’t receive evidence on PRV-HSMI, he already knew enough from his hearings to warn that “devastating disease could sweep through wild [salmon] populations…”

Just as Justice Cohen anticipated in his Report, the presence of PRV-HSMI in BC’s wild salmon was not revealed by the provincial government or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), the two agencies that are supposed to be monitoring the condition of marine health. Once again disclosure of PRV-HSMI came from Morton.

The credibility of her April, 2012, findings were supported by Professor Rick Routledge, a Simon Fraser University fish population statistician, whose research team found the piscine reovirus in 13 of 15 Cultus Lake cutthroat trout, a salmonid species (CBC, July 19/12). Such a virus might explain the mysterious collapse of Cultus Lake salmon runs.

Morton discovered PRV-HSMI when she purchased 45 BC-grown farmed Atlantic salmon from supermarkets in Vancouver and Victoria during February, 2012, and sent samples to PEI’s Atlantic Veterinary Lab for testing. Of the 45 samples, 44 tested positive for the piscine reovirus known to cause HSMI. The sequenced profile of the virus indicated it was 99 percent identical to the one found in Norwegian farmed salmon. If this reovirus is in BC farmed salmon in such high proportions, it is almost certainly in the wild salmon that swim past the farms on their migration routes, providing the most likely explanation for how the virus got to Cultus Lake cutthroat.

The implications for all salmonids are significant. As Morton explains, “The obvious potential that piscine reovirus is killing Fraser sockeye by weakening their hearts, rendering them less capable of fighting their way through white water rapids like Hell’s Gate, was never raised at the [Cohen Commission] Inquiry. Despite the Province of BC apparently knowing it was common in salmon farms.” As Morton contends, this information about PRV-HSMI is vital if we are to explain why “over 90 percent of the Fraser sockeye die as they are swimming upstream.”

Notably, when Dr. Kristy Miller was giving evidence at the reconvened hearings of the Cohen Commission in December, 2011, she did mention that preliminary indications — made independently by her in defiance of DFO instructions to cease investigations — identified piscine reovirus in Chinook salmon in a farm in Clayoquot Sound and in some Fraser River sockeye. Since the focus at the time was on infectious salmon anaemia (ISAv), the evidence of PRV-HSMI seemed to pass as merely incidental information.

But it wasn’t incidental information. It was and is extremely relevant, even though the presence of PRV doesn’t technically mean the clinical symptoms of HSMI are present. Reports from the provincial veterinarian pathologist lab as early as 2008 showed “congestion and hemorrhage in the stratum compactum of the heart” in farmed salmon, symptoms consistent with PRV-HSMI. And both the pathologist and the industry were aware of 75 percent infections rates of PRV in farmed salmon in 2010. Apparently this information was not conveyed to the Cohen Commission because the pathologist and industry did not consider the reovirus to be a health concern to wild salmon.

However, as Morton has pointed out in her website, this opinion is contradicted by “a joint scientific publication by the Center for Infection and Immunity, Columbia University, New York, and by Norwegian government scientists” who warn, “It is urgent that measures be taken to control PRV not only because it threatens domestic salmon production but also due to potential for transmission to wild salmon populations.”

This threat was not new information. HSMI was first identified in 1999 in Norwegian salmon farms, according to Brandon Keim, writing in Wired Science on July 13, 2010 (“Salmon Killer Disease Mystery Solved”). He reported that a two year study had determined the cause of HSMI to be a 10-gene piscine reovirus. “Infected fish are physically stunted,” Keim wrote, “and their muscles are so weakened that they have trouble swimming or even pumping blood. The disease is often fatal, and the original outbreak has been followed by 417 others in Norway and the United Kingdom. Every year there’s more of the disease and it’s now been seen in wild fish, suggesting that farm escapees are infecting already-dwindling wild stocks.” The disease, he noted, spreads like “wildfire” where fish are concentrated in high densities like salmon farms.

From the evidence presented to Justice Cohen, he concluded that such warnings are real and justified, and “that salmon farms along the sockeye migration route have the potential to introduce exotic diseases and to exacerbate endemic diseases…” (Chapter 2, p. 22A). “I therefore conclude,” he writes ,“that the potential harm posed to Fraser River sockeye salmon from salmon farms is serious or irreversible” (Ibid.) — a damning finding considering that, in his terminology, “Fraser River sockeye” usually means “all wild salmon”.

Knowing Whales

May 1, 2013OceansRay Grigg

The huge body of the dead humpback whale lay silently on the beach at White Rock, BC, as if it had chosen this spacious stretch of sand as a conspicuous and welcoming place to die. Its death on June 12, 2012, seemed important, perhaps because of the great size of its corpse, perhaps because of the incongruity of such a massive shape on a flat and vacant beach.

The whale looked serene in death, like a dark grey boulder that was reverently placed there by some mysterious force from the deep ocean. As if to confirm this, its body was ringed at a respectful distance with yellow police tape. And beyond this hallowed zone stood hundreds of people who had come to witness such an enormous dying. Everyone looked solemn and thoughtful. A few talked quietly in small groups. But most simply gazed at the dead humpback, trying to comprehend the significance of this death.

Some people had placed flowers on the whale’s forehead, near its twin blowholes. The stem of three red peonies, the bouquet of mauve gentian and a single white lily turned the body of the dead whale into an honoured shrine.

This humpback, perhaps 16 metres long, weighed about 40 tonnes. It was once weightless in the gentle buoyancy of the ocean. Now the unkind pull of gravity dragged down its flesh, accentuating the bones of its skull, the curve of its ribs and the long ridge of its spine — the graceful span of its great tail fluke forever immobilized. Its two enormous pectoral flippers — always too big to be credible — were now still, one folded close to its left side and the other splayed flat on the sand. The only part of its body that looked comfortable was the forward part of the head, the rostrum. It had sunk into the huge soft pillow of its lower jaw, the elastic pouch with baleen that once filtered tonnes of water in a single minute. The long line of its closed mouth, arcing from eye to eye, formed the contented curve of resolution. Death, it seems, must even come to whales.

What does it mean for a huge thing to die? Does its heart, weighing nearly 200 kilograms and having the volume of three adult humans, shudder to a sudden stop? Whalers say that such animals can take 30 minutes to die, even with explosive harpoons. Does all the life needed to power such an animal surrender with a slow reluctance, with a special hesitancy? Is death bigger for creatures that are so big?

Perhaps this explains why hundreds of people came to witness the whale’s death. They were not being macabre or ghoulish. The whale’s dying was a rare opportunity to confront the most the persistent secret to haunt their own consciousness. Death has always escaped any description of human experience. It is the black void from which no words or answers ever return. And this was a death “writ large”, a statement too obvious and clear to be avoided. Attending the whale’s dying was an invitation to come closer to death; it was an act of communion, and thus an opportunity to confirm their kinship with another living being.

But would they notice the death of a gnat, a grasshopper, a caterpillar or a spider? How many anonymous moths flutter to exhaustion around the hot light of a night bulb? How many summer bugs spatter on the windshield of a speeding car without a moment’s concern from the driver? Industrial fishing of the oceans drags millions of tonnes of individual fish to the decks of trawlers where they each flap frantically and drown slowly in the terrible air. When a forest is cut down and bulldozed for a road, a building or a parking lot, a complex and living civilization of plants, animals, insects and fungi dies. Thousands of whales, as large and noble as the one on White Rock’s beach, are hunted and killed yearly. So much dying dissolves into a turmoil of death so large that human concern is easily numbed by its enormity. Of all the species that ever existed on Earth, 99.9 percent are now extinct. For the 7 billion people who are presently alive on our planet, an estimated 100 billion of their forebears have died.

Death is so common that we can easily become inured to it. So we learn to avoid it with a dismissive indifference. Or we deliberately separate ourselves from it — abattoirs do not have glass walls. The ethical implications of killing, cutting and mincing flesh are avoided by silence and sanitized with styrofoam trays, plastic wrap and the hygienics of cheerful merchandising. Feigned ignorance is supposed to absolve us of discomfort. Selective innocence is supposed to lighten the burden of caring. Meanwhile, the impersonality we give to our technology is supposed to cast a spell of forgiveness that absolves it and ourselves of all the death it causes.

Death, of course, is natural. But the seven billion of us crowded onto this rare planet wreak havoc on the living ecologies that vitalize it with diversity and mystery. We terrorize life with our energized machines and their incessant hyperactivity. We would prefer not to notice this affront to nature so we dismiss their sinister work as normal, as necessary growth, as important development. And we diminish the opportunity to notice by continuing to bulldoze, build, industrialize and urbanize — more than half of humanity now lives in cities, increasingly isolated from the destructive consequences of our actions.

This is why hundreds of people came to witness the death of the humpback whale on White Rock’s sandy beach. As a symbol of their caring, concern and vulnerability, they placed flowers on its great corpse. They gathered to meet and confront such an enormous dying because it was too large and conspicuous to avoid. The whale’s death forcibly reminded them of the spreading shadow of a civilization so large and consuming that it often seems unstoppable and overwhelming. The crowds were not only somber and thoughtful for the whale but for themselves, for the future of their children, and for the future of all the other living things that will make the same haunting journey.

How Cohen Recommendations, Termination Clause and BCNDP Can End Risk to Wild Salmon Economy

April 25, 2013Fisheries, Oceans, Politics, Salmon Farming and AquacultureKevin Logan

Independent salmon biologist Alexandra Morton has worked tirelessly and endlessly to raise awareness about the threat open net pen salmon farms presents to our coast.

For decades now, this frequently published scientist has worked to understand the impacts of this industry on wild salmon. She has also clearly demonstrated that the entirety of the wild salmon economy far and away exceeds the importance of this one industry alone.

The Wild Salmon economy dwarfs, by any measure, the economic benefit of fish farming and it makes no sense to continue putting the health of our wild salmon at risk as a result. This was covered in Damien Gillis’ recent article in The Common Sense Canadian – which notes the staggering disparity between the sport fishing and salmon-dependent tourism economy and the paltry jobs and economic value provided by salmon farms.

The video below is from a recent screening of Salmon Confidential, a stunning documentary which has taken BC by storm, generating 115,000 views online and packed halls around the province since its release last month.

This short clip includes Green Party of Canada Leader Elizabeth May, Alexandra Morton and a Provincial Candidate for the BCNDP, Gary Holman. Highlighted in the video is the current position of the BCNDP.

For the past few months the NDP has claimed that the Provincial Government has no jurisdiction or capacity to move on the information Alexandra has provided on viruses affecting wild and farmed salmon and bring an end to the threat to the Wild Salmon economy and deeply entrenched coastal culture of this great province.

However, the NDP has committed to “adopting the Cohen Commission recommendations“, which include a focus on applying the “Precautionary Principle” when dealing with the future of this industry and removing salmon farms from the Discovery Islands by 2020, unless DFO can prove they are having “less than minimal impact.”

This is a very welcome development. It means the NDP has committed to exercising this important Precautionary Principle when establishing policy related to this industry.

With that knowledge, let’s turn to the notion that BC has no jurisdiction as a result of a recent lawsuit which saw the Federal Government assume much of the oversight of the industry.

While this is essentially true, there is in fact a little known clause that exists in the agreements the Province holds with each and every fish farm.

It is an exit clause in their tenures which can be exercised within 60 days – with no compensation – that revokes the license for them to operate, if it is in the public interest. (See the full occupation license here)

Here is the exact text from Section 5, Subsection 8

8.1(g) (Termination) states that Marine Harvest agrees with the Province that “if we require the Land for our own use or, in our opinion, it is in the public interest to cancel this Agreement and we have given you 60 days’ written notice of such requirement or opinion, this Agreement will, at our option and with or without entry, terminate your right to use and occupy the Land.”

s. 8.3(a) goes further, and states, “You agree with us that (a) you will make no claim for compensation, in damages or otherwise, upon the lawful termination of this Agreement under section 8.1.” (emphasis added)

Given the NDP has adopted the Cohen Commission recommendation of exercising the Precautionary Principle, and there is ample evidence that our wild salmon are at risk, it is time we encourage the NDP to focus on these licenses, and engage this industry in a proactive fashion in a bid to eliminate this unacceptable risk to the economy and long established culture that healthy wild salmon supports.

Let’s all encourage those NDP candidates seeking your vote to honor their commitment to adopt the Precautionary Principle as recommended by the Cohen Commission.

And let’s press each and every one of them to act on these license agreements, with a focus on resolving this clear and indisputable threat, by asking them to execute the termination clause for fish farms licensed to operate on wild salmon migration routes.

If the NDP wants to be seen as credible on their claim of adopting Cohen’s recommendations and do whats right for the economy, then they must act now and follow though on their commitment while supporting the growth of the Wild Salmon economy – already more than ten times bigger than the salmon farming industry.

Tide turning against salmon farms in lead-up to BC election?

April 15, 2013Oceans, Politics, Salmon Farming and Aquaculture, Western CanadaDamien Gillis

As the BC election approaches, the Norwegian-dominated aquaculture industry suddenly finds itself swimming upstream.

Despite mounting evidence of its impacts on the marine environment – and over significant public and First Nations’ protest – the farmed salmon lobby has managed to maintain its controversial open net pen operations for decades, relatively unopposed at the political level.

Until now, it appears.

A series of significant events over the past few months have left the industry increasingly vulnerable to a regulatory crackdown.

The first major blow to the industry came in October of last year, when Justice Bruce Cohen got tough on salmon farms in the final recommendations of his 2-year judicial inquiry into collapsing Fraser River sockeye stocks. While he acknowledged that no “smoking gun” emerged from the exhaustive $25 million investigation, aquaculture was singled out as a key suspect.

Cohen’s recommendations to protect wild salmon from open net pen salmon farms included:

Prioritizing the health of wild salmon over suitability for aquaculture when siting farms

Conducting more research into diseases that may be impacting wild salmon

Properly implementing the Precautionary Principle and removing farms in the Discovery Islands region (noted as particularly dangerous to migrating salmon runs) should more definitive evidence come to bear that they cannot safely coexist with wild fish.

It would take some six months for Cohen’s non-binding recommendations to register politically – but boy are they starting to now.

First, in late March, Liberal Premier Christy Clark came out with an unexpected commitment to implement a number of Cohen’s recommendations. Clark vowed to cap future open-net salmon farms in the Discovery Islands, a critical wild salmon migratory route. Liberal Agriculture Minister Norm Letnick stated, “[Cohen] basically says we should use the Precautionary Principle and what we’re doing today as a government is agreeing with him.”

If the salmon farmers weren’t sweating before, this will surely have caught their attention. This is, after all, a government which has proven overwhelmingly sympathetic toward the industry throughout the past decade – even going as far as reimbursing it for environmental fines collected by the NDP.

Though a court case won a few years ago by independent biologist Alexandra Morton and her lawyer Greg McDade forced the federal government to take back the regulation of fish farms, the province retained power over the licensing and location of farms. Thus a change in policy at the provincial level could still spell trouble for the industry.

No sooner had Clark issued her tough talk on salmon farms, than NDP environment critic and likely future minister Rob Flemming moved to one-up her. Flemming told CBC radio, “They’ve been missing in action on this file for so long that to say on a friday afternoon six months after Justice Cohen delivered his report that they deign to agree with his recommendations just shows that they have not paid considerable attention to this.” According to the CBC story, “Flemming says the NDP would initiate a review of the issue including looking at banning open net fish farms along key salmon migration routes.”

Not just capping new farms, but removing and banning existing ones. That’s about as close to Justice Cohen’s prescriptions as any party – federal or provincial – has come to date.

Days later, NDP Agriculture Critic Lana Popham – also a leading candidate to take up the same portfolio in Cabinet – posted a statement on her facebook page, relaying the NDP’s developing policy on the issue. As environment and agriculture ministers respectively, Flemming and Popham would be the new government’s point people on the file – their comments here are deliberate and significant.

Popham’s preface to the policy statement suggested the public campaign for aquaculture reform is not going unnoticed. “Thank you to all the salmon warriors out there,” Popham wrote. “You’ve directed a lot of barbs our way recently, but your efforts to push political parties to do whatever is necessary to protect wild salmon is a great contribution to BC. Keep it up!”

The statement itself denotes the party’s likely framing of the issue going forward – i.e. addressing the economic risk-reward proposition: “[Wild salmon] is important for our coastal ecology, for the wild and sports fishing economies and particularly for First Nations. We also recognize that BC has an aquaculture industry that creates direct and indirect employment in our coastal communities and that it is incumbent on all to make sure the industry has minimal impact.”

The statement continues:

New Democrats have clearly stated that if we form government in May, we will work with the DFO to act on the recommendations from Justice Cohen including:

regularly revising salmon farm siting criteria to reflect new scientific information about farms on or near Fraser River sockeye salmon migration routes as well as the cumulative effects of these farms;

explicitly considering proximity to Fraser River sockeye when siting farms;∙

limiting salmon farm production and licence duration;∙

using the precautionary principle to re-evaluate risk and mitigation measures for salmon farms in the Discovery Islands, including closing those farms that are determined to pose more than a minimal risk of serious harm to the health of migrating Fraser River sockeye.

In addition, we will maintain the existing moratorium, introduced in 2008, on new fish farm licenses on the North Coast.

The NDP’s repositioning on the file comes following a new wave of public interest in the subject. Salmon Confidential, a 70-minute documentary which tracks Alexandra Morton’s research into viruses impacting both farmed and wild fish, has reached over 100,000 people online since its release last month. It is currently filling halls around the province during a series of pre-election screenings. These events are drawing in high-profile speakers such as David Suzuki and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.

Meanwhile, at the federal level, the Harper Government did an about-face recently, agreeing to take part in and help fund a new large-scale program to test for viruses likely connected with fish farms. The work is being led by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans geneticist, Dr. Kristi Miller, whose leading-edge research was a key focus of the Cohen Commission.

Miller made global headlines when, prior to her subpoena by Justice Cohen, she was muzzled from speaking to media about her work. Fromrecent interviews she’s given on this new research program – co-sponsored by Genome BC and the Pacific Salmon Foundation – it appears, at least for the time being, that muzzle has been removed.

The aquaculture industry should be concerned about these developments, not just because of what this new research may uncover, but because it demonstrates that even the Harper Government has been forced to change its approach to public concerns surrounding salmon farms. That includes a recent federal report suggesting it’s time to get serious about moving to closed-containment technology, which separates farmed fish from wild.

Finally, the industry should be concerned that the jig is up for the defense upon which it traditionally falls back – namely, the “jobs” argument. Recent data confirm that local economic benefits from aquaculture simply pale in comparison to the industries it puts at risk.

For instance, in 2011, according to DFO and Stats BC, sport fishing produced revenues of $925 million, contributing $325 million to BC’s GDP and 8,400 direct jobs. Compare that with the Norwegian-dominated aquaculture industry, which produced $469 million in revenues (that’s for all aquaculture, of which salmon farms are only one component). Salmon farms specifically contributed just $8.5 million to our GDP.

That’s because they invest very little locally in plant and equipment and produce only a fraction of the 1,700 relatively low-wage jobs across the entire aquaculture sector – which includes shellfish and other finfish. Moreover, the profits flow out of BC to foreign shareholders.

That paltry $8.5 million figure was down 8% from the previous year, and based on reports of numerous farms in the Campbell River area having been fallowed over the past year – for problems left unexplained by the industry – we can expect the 2012 numbers to slide even further.

By contrast, the province’s $13.4 Billion tourism industry (up 44% since 2000) is built largely on BC’s “Best Place on Earth” / “Supernatural BC” brand, which depends greatly on wild salmon and produces vastly more jobs than do salmon farms. The provincial NDP is already showing signs of grasping these facts and understanding how they can be used to frame industry reforms.

In other words, the final fig leaf protecting the industry is about to be swept away in the coastal breeze.

It remains to be seen, post-election, where a new NDP government goes with its aquaculture policy, what these new tests yield, and how the Harper Government reacts to them. The industry has proven as prone to escape as the creatures it rears. Yet, for the first time in a long time, the tide is clearly turning against the Norwegian farmed salmon lobby.

Catch Alexandra Morton and David Suzuki at a presentation and discussion of Salmon Confidential this Thursday evening, April 18, at Vancouver’s Stanley Theatre. The film will be shown in Sidney on the evening of the 20th, featuring Elizabeth May and BC Green Party Leader Jane Sterk.

Salmon Confidential

April 6, 2013Fisheries, Oceans, Salmon Farming and AquacultureRay Grigg

Anyone who has been following the sorry saga of inexplicable diseases and unusual mortality in BC’s wild salmon will not be surprised that the information in Twyla Roscovich’s documentary, Salmon Confidential, links the source of this trouble to the salmon farming industry. The surprise, however, is the impact of such information when its complexity is condensed to an intense 70 minutes.

The documentary, of course, is guided by its own perspective. But this perspective is supported by such compelling and powerful circumstantial evidence that it incriminates the salmon farming industry and the government agencies so obviously accommodating and protecting it. If the health of wild salmon are at risk, these are prime suspects.

Twyla Roscovich, with her keen filming and editing skills, presents a convincing case. But the highest accolades go to Alexandra Morton, the indefatigable BC biologist whose worries about the safety of wild salmon and the entire ecology they support have become her life’s concern. Her research and investigations have brought the public’s attention to the alien diseases threatening native Pacific salmon. It was ostensibly her work that resulted in the reconvening of the Cohen Commission to hear new evidence on previously undisclosed viral infections in wild fish. This testimony subsequently led to the incriminating recommendations in Justice Cohen’s Report, which clearly question the environmental safety of salmon farms.

Morton’s evidence linking salmon farms to diseases in wild salmon has now initiated “the world’s largest study of salmon health” headed by the genetics expert, Dr. Kristi Miller, the same researcher who refused to be silenced by the ministerial pressures of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans where she is still employed. This 5-year study, involving DFO, Genome BC and the Pacific Salmon Foundation will use state-of-the-art technology developed by Dr. Miller to examine salmon diseases from farmed, hatchery and wild sources.

Yet another consequence of Morton’s heroic efforts, belatedly announced on March 23rd by the BC government, is a moratorium until 2020 on any further expansion of salmon farms in the Discovery Islands area, that narrow cluster of passages where many wild fish are compelled to migrate on their journey from and back to their nascent rivers.

This situation, the film contends, is a death trap. One of the most searing images in Salmon Confidential is of a single surviving salmon swimming upstream past the white corpses of thousands of dead and unspawned fish. Something alien, unusual and traumatic is happening to BC’s wild salmon, testament to an unfolding ecological tragedy. Norway has confronted this same problem by banning salmon farms from the migration routes of wild fish. Why then, according to evidence given by one DFO official at the Cohen Commission’s reconvened hearings, has no such application ever been refused on BC’s coast?

A memorable and revealing moment occurs in Salmon Confidential when Dr. Kristi Miller testifies that DFO warned her not to do any testing if she didn’t know what the ramifications would be. In other words, this government agency has an unofficial agenda that could be compromised by an inconvenient scientific discovery. Placing ignorance ahead of knowledge is the perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the CFIA, seems to have a similar unofficial agenda. Infectious salmon anemia is designated a reportable disease of global health concern. If the CFIA should find ISA in BC farmed salmon, international protocol would require that all exports stop. So the solution to this problem, according to Salmon Confidential, is to not find the disease. The documentary explores the complex ends to which the CFIA has gone in order to hide evidence — complete with a threatened government Bill 37 (2012) that would forbid any individual from revealing the existence of such diseases as ISA. The reality is that at least two other new diseases in wild salmon, piscine reovirus and salmon alphavirus, have also been linked to salmon farms.

Despite the serious tone of Salmon Confidential, the documentary does have moments of levity. When salmon farmers refused to give Morton any samples of their fish for testing, she and her fellow investigators found an ingenious solution. They simply bought farmed salmon from a local supermarket — of the 11 fish carefully dated and identified with the name of the grower, 3 tested positive for ISA. And when Morton decided that testing dying fish from a salmon farm would be the definitive evidence, she was even denied “mortes”. As the researchers plotted how to surreptitiously recover a sample, an eagle picked up one of the carcasses and unceremoniously delivered some crucially important body parts to a nearby rock.

But Salmon Confidential is much more serious than it is entertaining. For anyone who cares about the future of wild salmon in British Columbia, this is a film that must be seen. It identifies Twyla Roscovich as a skilled documentarian and places Alexandra Morton in the pantheon of heroic environmentalists — not to mention a competent scientist and a gifted detective. Both these women have the insight, perseverance and fortitude to help save BC’s ecological future as they shake the edifice of deception and duplicity that they characterize as the history of salmon farming in British Columbia.

By coincidence, Salmon Confidential was finished in time for the upcoming provincial election in May. Both Roscovich and Morton hope its timely arrival makes the protection of wild salmon a part of the political conversation. Indeed it should, given the crucial importance of these iconic fish to BC’s identity and ecology. The film is now touring the province and will be shown around the province over the next several months. See showing details here.

New Film, Cutting-Edge Research Probe Salmon Virus Mystery

March 12, 2013Salmon Farming and AquacultureDamien Gillis

The mystery of BC’s disappearing wild salmon is back on the radar this week, with the release of a new documentary on the subject and the launch of a groundbreaking research partnership to study farmed and wild fish for viruses that may be affecting both.

Salmon Confidential, a feature-length film released online last week, explores the battle over salmon science that was at the centre of last year’s federal judicial inquiry into rapidly declining Fraser River sockeye stocks, referred to as the Cohen Commission. Filmmaker Twyla Roscovich tracks the extraordinary efforts by several federal and provincial government agencies to muzzle leading scientists hot on the trail of exotic viruses – foremost among these the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ own Dr. Kristi Miller.

The film is already generating some buzz, garnering over eleven thousand online views in under a week.

Also central to the film’s narrative are the Quixotic efforts of an unlikely team of scientists operating outside the government’s control – people like independent salmon biologist Alexandra Morton, SFU’s Dr. Rick Routledge, and two world-renowned virus experts in Atlantic Canada and Norway analyzing the samples of farmed and wild fish collected by Morton’s largely volunteer team. While they maintain, along with DFO’s Miller – who operates a state-of-the-art genomics lab out of Nanaimo’s Pacific Biological Station – that the deadly diseases like Infectious Salmon Anemia virus they’re finding offer a plausible answer to the mystery of BC’s disappearing salmon, government representatives have gone out of their way to attack the credibility of these scientists and labs and undermine their findings.

The narrative these researchers presented to the public was initially drowned out by highly sophisticated, effective media relations counterattack led by representatives of DFO and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. But the latest chapter in this salmon virus saga may well tell a different story, as a newly announced government-backed research initiative, led in part by Dr. Miller, suggests (more on that below).

Watch Salmon Confidential for yourself here:

The Kristi Miller we see in Salmon Confidential has been muzzled by her government minders, prevented from speaking openly to media about her leading-edge use of genomic profiling to assess fish health and diseases. Only through official subpoena by a judicial inquiry is she able to suggest that these viruses may well be the “smoking gun” in the collapse of BC’s wild salmon. But there is evidence today that the intense public and media pressure that grew in reaction to Miller’s muzzling has had an effect on the Harper Government.

This week, a new scientific partnership to study salmon diseases was announced between Miller’s DFO lab, a government-supported research cluster called Genome BC, and the non-profit Pacific Salmon Foundation. According to a media release touting the new venture, “The project will conduct epidemiological assessments to explore the transmission dynamics and historical presence of detected microbes, with key focus on microbes that are suspected globally to be causing disease in salmon. Researchers will apply genomic technology to identify and verify which microbes are presently carried by BC’s wild and cultured fish.”

The project will span 4 phases over 5 years, with the first phase, valued at $930,000, already underway and set to conclude mid-2013. Phase 1, which involves collecting samples of farmed and wild fish for testing, is being co-directed by the PSF’s Dr. Brian Riddell and DFO’s Dr. Miller. The initiative grew out of the final recommendations of the Cohen Commission, which focused heavily on the impacts of open net pen salmon farms and the diseases they incubate on wild salmon. “The research conducted by the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and funded in part by Genome BC, will address specific recommendations from the Cohen Commission report and build on the body of research referenced by the Commission,” the media release noted.

According to Riddell, president of the Pacific Salmon Foundation, “This project is about developing effective monitoring tools to assess the microbes in BC’s salmon, assessing the risk of these microbes to Pacific salmon, and establishing public confidence that people are watching over the health of our wild salmon populations.” As Riddell told The Globe and Mail this week, “This is going to be the first really large-scale effort to look at the health of all salmon…It’s incredibly exciting.”

Also of note is Miller’s new-found freedom to speak publicly about her work. In her first interview in several years, she explained to The Globe’s Mark Hume the comparative advantage of her lab over less up-to-date techniques for tracking these elusive viruses. “There is … technology that I have been developing for the past year … that has the capacity to run about 45 microbes across 96 individual [fish samples] at a time, so one can quite rapidly generate a lot of information from a platform,” Miller said. “And that’s our goal at the moment – to assess 45 microbes that are known or suspected to cause disease in salmon worldwide.”

With significant resources at their disposal, Miller’s leading-edge lab and methods, and the credibility of a multi-stakeholder effort involving government, non-profits and the scientific community, this venture may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of BC’s disappearing salmon, once and for all.

Rafe’s Welcome Letter to New Sun & Province Publisher

February 2, 2013Hydropower, Pipelines and Supertankers, Politics, Salmon Farming and Aquaculture, Western CanadaRafe Mair

In the Postmedia press this past week we learned that Gordon Fisher has become publisher of The Vancouver Sun and The Province. Here is my welcome.

Dear Mr. Fisher,

My congratulations on your new posting. These two papers need all the help they can get.

I’m an octogenarian now – I love that word because it’s more descriptive than “senior citizen” and because no one I knew in my 40s would have bet a plug nickel I’d ever get this far.

As a lifetime British Columbian I go back a long way. As a youngster I was a Tillicum mostly because The Province gave you a neat faked silver totem pole as a badge. The magic words were “Klahowya , Tillicum”, which my cousin said came from Indians saying to Hudson’s Bay employees, “Clerk how you?”

I doubt that but have never heard of a better answer

I didn’t join The Sun’s Uncle Ben club because my Dad hated The Sun – in those days there was real rivalry!

I remember some of the great writers of that day – Eric Nichol, Jack Scott, Harold Weir (a rabid royalist) and I even read Sir Michael Bruce, whose taffy-nosed columns used to get under everyone’s skin.

I would like to talk about more modern times.

Back in the 70s I ran for the BC Legislature and as I awaited the election I couldn’t wait to read Marjorie Nichols in The Sunas night after night she kicked the crap out of the NDP government, especially Dave Barrett.

When I was elected it seemed as if Marjorie had had a brain transplant as now she was hammering the hell out of the Socreds and Bill Bennett!

I asked myself how Marjorie had changed so dramatically until the light went on – it wasn’t Marjorie who had changed, it was the government!

As the days passed I noticed that Jack Webster, Pat Burns, Jack Wasserman, Denny Boyd, Garry Bannerman, Ed Murphy, Jim Hume, Barbara McClintock – indeed the entire political press were “unfairly” beating up on us.

After I left the government I realized that they were “holding our feet to the fire” and it made for a better, more responsive government. It was that obligation I adopted when in 1981 I went into radio.

In the nineties you will remember the NDP under Mike Harcourt took over for the next decade.

The print media, especially Mike Smyth of The Province and Vaughn Palmer of the Sun were merciless in their pursuit of at least a close proximity to the truth. There were two areas that stick in my mind – the fast ferries issue and Glen Clark’s dealing with a man trying to get a gambling licence, who did some work on the premier’s house.

These two and Les Leyne and Jim Hume, both of the Times-Colonist, were relentless in their pursuit of the facts and highly critical of the premier and other members of the government.

In 2001 it all changed as the Liberals under Gordon Campbell took power. The media suddenly started to avoid issues or give them a once-and-for-all treatment.

Let me be specific.

For the first time in my life, the environment has become an issue, perhaps the #1 in the province. In no special order, here are the main issues: loss of agricultural land due to the Gateway Project, fish farms, private river power, pipelines and tankers, and most recently “fracking”.

Mr. Fisher, I ask you to look at your columnists and determine for yourself whether any of these questions have been canvassed – not well canvassed but canvassed at all.

Let’s start with fish farms. These have not been covered at all in spite of the terrible consequences of them including ruination of wild salmon! I invite you to find a critical word – indeed any word at all – in Smyth or Palmer’s columns in the last 12 years. You will note that your former editor of the Sun editorial pages, a “fellow” of the Fraser Institute, freely gave op-ed opportunities to the fish farmers’ lobby, yet you’ll search in vain to see anything from, say, Alexandra Morton.

The so-called “run of river” policy has desecrated 75 rivers and proposes to do the same to hundreds more. These projects build a dam (they prefer to call them “weirs” but they are dams) which kill migrating salmon and resident trout and, in effect, permanently decimate the ecosystems that depend upon the river. You see, Mr. Fisher, these plants not only impact the fish directly but the entire ecology as they require roads and clear-cutting for transmission lines.

Let’s leave aside the environment and look at the economics.

BC Hydro is compelled by the provincial government to sign agreements with Independent Power Producers (IPPS) on a “take or pay” basis meaning that when IPPs are going all out during run-offs, BC Hydro, which has full reservoirs, must buy this power even though they don’t need it, at double to ten times the export price and many times more expensive than it can generate it themselves. BC Hydro owes IPPs for future power over $50 Billion!

This all means, of course, that Hydro can no longer pay a dividend to the government of the customary hundreds of millions of dollars and is, in fact, bankrupt by private, corporate standards.

I invite you to look at your columnists’ work over the past 5 years and try to find a discouraging word about private power. There have been the occasional, very occasional, news story but your political columnists are and have been silent.

Let me pause and tell you that after I had raised hell on this subject, Province editor Wayne Moriarty phoned me and whined, “Rafe, do you think I tell my columnists what they must not write about?” to which I replied ,“You don’t have to, Wayne, you don’t have to.”

Let’s move on to the pipelines issue, especially the Enbridge proposal and the proposed new Kinder Morgan line. At the same time, let’s glance at the tanker traffic these two pipelines will need.

These are both huge issues. The issue isn’t the risk of spills, Mr. Fisher, but the certainty of them. Even the Federal Environment Ministry (scarcely known to be tree-huggers) says that these spills are inevitable.

But, you may well ask, surely these spills can be cleaned up?

First let’s deal with the proposed Enbridge line, which is more than 1,000 Kilometers long and passes through the Rockies, the Rocky Mountain Trench, through the Coast Range then through The Great Bear Rainforest. When a spill occurs, how the devil will Enbridge get men and machines in to the spill area?

Mr. Fisher, it’s even worse. It doesn’t matter.

Enbridge had a huge spill into the Kalamazoo River in July 2010 and it hasn’t been cleaned up yet and never will be. Access to the spill site posed no difficulties but cleanup certainly did.

The cargo is what they call dilbit or diluted bitumen, product of the Tar Sands, which in itself is the world’s largest polluter. With ordinary bulk oil one can get to a lot of it by “rafting” which, as you would imagine, is surrounding it, localizing it then scooping it up.

Unfortunately, within a very short time after a dilbit spill, the bitumen separates from the diluent and sinks like a stone. Not only will Enbridge be unable to get to the spill, even if it could they would be helpless to do anything of consequence.

The problem scarcely ends there. The tanker traffic poses huge problems.

Again, Mr. Fisher, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when”. The consequences of a spill are too awful to even contemplate. Whether down Douglas Channel from Kitimat or through Vancouver Harbour from Burnaby the consequences of a spill will be horrendous.

Yes, with double hulling there will be fewer accidents, the operative word being fewer. As we know from the BC Ferry Queen of the North calamity, where there is a possibility of human error, tragedies will happen.

I’m sorry to have been so long-winded, Mr. Fisher, but my point is that Postmedia’s coverage of the matters mentioned has been pathetic and journalistic critique, let alone criticism, has been nonexistent.

I ask you, are you content to let this continue?

Yours very truly,
Rafe Mair

Of Frogs and Fishes: Farms Spawn Lethal Diseases

February 1, 2013Climate Change, Fisheries, Oceans, Species At Risk, WATERRay Grigg

A lethal fungus has spread around the world, killing frogs at a rate 40,000 times faster than at any time since these amphibian species formed some 360 million years ago. Habitat loss is a factor, too, as wetlands are drained and forests are cut. But the most lethal and uncontainable enemy of frogs — and salamanders, too — is a single-celled fungus called Batrachochytrium dentrobatidis (Bd), a very strange killer since it belongs to a family of fungi that has long co-existed with frogs and has been relatively harmless. What happened to make it lethal is a mystery biologists set out to explain (NewScientist, July 7/12).

At first they suspected that climate change might be creating the ideal conditions for the fungus to flourish. Another candidate was pollutants. But the definitive answer came when researchers sequenced the genome and discovered that samples of the lethal Bd collected from everywhere in the world were essentially identical.

Dr. Matthew Fisher, an epidemiologist from Imperial College London, calls this variant “the global panzootic lineage”. Since it doesn’t survive in salt water and it has no airborne stage, it had to be getting from continent to continent with the help of people.

Two species of frogs have been traded internationally for decades. One is the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), used for research purposes, and the other is the North America bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana), used for meat. Both species are relatively resistant to Bd so they could carry it undetected to wild frogs — this vector was confirmed when the first two outbreaks of Bd in wild frogs were detected in a site downstream from a bullfrog farm in the Philippines and in a newly established bullfrog population in a lake in the United Kingdom.

The other factor contributing to Bd’s virulence is the crowded conditions in which captive frogs are bred. In a wild environment, “natural selection tends to make diseases less virulent, because pathogens that rapidly kill their hosts have less chance of spreading. In crowded conditions, however, evolution favours the nasty” (Ibid.).

Somewhere in a frog farm, two related species of Bd combined to form a new and lethal variant. It was then distributed around the world with the farmed frogs. In other words, the Bd that is killing hapless wild frogs everywhere on Earth is “our own Frankenstein monster” (Ibid.).

This scenario should be familiar because it corresponds exactly to net-pen salmon farming in BC’s West Coast where viruses have been brewing for years in crowded “feedlot” conditions. The prospect that these farms could import and then breed a lethal variant virus which could subsequently escape to wild salmon has been haunting independent salmon biologist Alexandra Morton since her studies first found the same viral diseases in both farmed Atlantic salmon and native salmon stocks.

Morton worries that all the conditions are in place for a wild salmon catastrophe. Eggs that salmon farms import from around the world arrive with exotic diseases. Viruses flourish amid the hundreds of thousands of fish that are confined in individual net-pens, a threat accentuated by the fact that viral diseases are known to exchange genetic material to create new strains.

Pesticides, parasites, feces and diseases pass unobstructed through the net-pens into the surrounding marine ecosystem. And the industry has further increased the risk by choosing to locate many of their salmon farms along the migration routes of the wild fish.

Morton’s concerns are credible. Although motivated by a passion to protect wild salmon and the entire West Coast ecology they support, she nonetheless thinks like a scientist. Her arguments are rational, her studies are empirical, her gathering of data is rigorous, and her fears are justified. They are also shared by almost everyone who is free from the economic leverage purveyed by the salmon farming industry.

As Morton points out in her electronic newsletter, when the salmon farming industry first wanted to import Atlantic salmon eggs to the West Coast in the 1980s, the proposal was widely opposed by “the Steelhead Society of British Columbia, United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, BC Ministry of Environment, even members of the federal fisheries salmon transplant committee, and the Director General of Fisheries and Oceans, Pacific Region… They all cited concern that exotic diseases would accompany these shipments.”

For this reason, in 1986, Dr. Dave Narver, Director of the BC Ministry of Environment, warned that the “introduction of exotic races of salmonids into British Columbia is probably the most critical issue ever to face the maintenance of wild salmon stocks.” In 1990, Pat Chamut, Director General of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, warned that the “continued large-scale introductions [of salmon eggs] from areas of the world including Washington State, Scotland, Norway and even eastern Canada would eventually result in the introduction of exotic disease agents of which the potential impact on both cultured and wild salmonids in B.C. could be both biologically damaging to the resources and economically devastating to its user groups.”

Morton believes that the salmon farming industry, in conjunction with sympathetic government agencies, have set in place the conditions that could unleash a viral catastrophe in BC’s wild salmon populations. For her, the ingredients for crisis are in place and the waiting is agonizing.

The crisis of frogs and fishes is analogous. History repeatedly reminds us that our ignorance has a propensity to combine with our venality to create disasters. Frogs all over the planet are dying in massive numbers because we were instrumental in concocting a Bd “monster”. The possibility exists that we are about to inflict the same fate on our beloved wild salmon.

Are ‘Frankenfish’ Swimming Your Way? FDA Debates GM Salmon

January 27, 2013Food, GMO, Oceans, Salmon Farming and AquacultureHeidi Osterman

The seemingly straightforward question, “What are we having for dinner?” may get trickier to answer, due to a revolution in science. Many people call it “frankenfood” when the answer to the dinner question could be, “Salmon with a dash of eel genes”!

This genetic manipulation isn’t some pie-in-the-sky notion. In December, the US Food and Drug Administration moved one step closer to approving Massachusetts-based AquaBounty’s application to sell genetically modified (GM) salmon. The agency found the company’s AquAdvantage GM salmon is safe for human consumption and does not pose a significant risk to the environment. Yet both AquaBounty’s product and numerous other GMO foods have raised serious concerns from many different groups.

Technology is moving so far ahead of common understanding that the language of “trans-genes” is not yet in our vocabulary, but it should be. If you ask most Canadians what genetic engineering (GE), or genetic modification mean, most people don’t even understand the question, let alone have an answer.

As a primer for anyone who is bewildered by the idea of designer plants and animals, genetic modification is a technology that scientists use to bring genetic information from different species together in unnatural combinations. Think of it as a Rubik’s cube where you can twist in genes from unrelated species, adding spider genes to a goat, or genes from bacteria and viruses into corn.

Despite the general lack of knowledge about genetically modified organisms (GMO) our Federal government is promoting transgenic technologies using taxpayers’ money. As recently as January 2010, AquaBounty was given $2.9 million for research purposes. The company wants to produce all the GM salmon eggs on Prince Edward Island, and then ship the eggs to Panama for growing-out and processing, for export to North America as “table-ready” fish.

What is the difference between genetically modified (GMO) salmon and natural salmon? AquaBounty’s gene-altered salmon are artificially given genes from an eel-like creature called ocean pout and genes from Chinook salmon.

These salmon have been genetically re-structured to produce growth hormones throughout the year and therefore grow unnaturally quickly. The gene-altered salmon are also nutritionally inferior to wild Atlantic salmon. According to data supplied by AquaBounty, gene-modified salmon contain less beneficial omega-3 fatty acids than other farmed salmon.

Of major concern about gene-altered salmon is escape and harm to wild salmon populations. What would happen if GE fish were to escape into the wild? The biotech company created the fish to be sterile, but admits that 5% could be fertile. I wonder whose job it will be to determine if fish are fertile?! Wild Atlantic salmon stock could be cross-contaminated and the already endangered natural species could be severely affected.

Another major issue is the health risks to humans who would eat this product. The health data supplied by the company has been summarized as “sloppy science, with woefully inadequate data, small sample sizes, and questionable practices”, according to Senior Scientist Dr. Michael Hansen of the Consumers Union.

AquaBounty’s research includes testing seemingly designed to obscure potential problems rather than reveal them. Take for instance the sample sizes. Common sense would tell you that when studying something as revolutionary as the world’s first GMO fish, which steadily pumps out growth hormones, that studies must be very broad and rigorous. Yet the actual sample size of the study to test for changes in morphology of the salmon involved only 12 fish.

Data published in the British newspaper, the Guardian, revealed that the AquaBounty salmon had an elevated level of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), which is a hormone linked to a number of cancers. The FDA, which is also in the process of approving this ‘animal-drug’ (as it is classified), dismissed the fact that there was a high rate of physical deformity among the modified salmon.

Another disturbing fact is that government officials in the US and Canada have not asked the company for data from long-term feeding trials. Without this testing, the public has no way of knowing if this modified salmon is safe to eat. Does that leave humans as the actual test animals? If approved, will the fish be labeled as being genetically modified? Currently there is no mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods in North America.

In the USA, over 300 environmental, consumer, health and animal welfare organizations, including salmon and fishing groups and associations, chefs and restaurants signed joint letters to the FDA requesting that the approval be denied.

Even the farmed fish industry is in opposition. The executive director of the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance told CBC, “The Canadian aquaculture industry does not support the commercial production of transgenic fish for human consumption.”

In North America, people are still largely unaware of any threat to the wild natural Atlantic salmon. Those who are aware have planned demonstrations, are writing letters to the editor, talking to their government officials and telling their fish suppliers that they will stop eating salmon entirely if modified salmon goes to market and is unlabeled.

Consumers are not demanding designer fish, nor did they ask for the taxpayers’ money to be used to re-create plants and animals into patented name brands. Citizens content with the natural plants and animals are increasingly disturbed that public involvement has been entirely bypassed on a subject as important as the future of the food supply.

The FDA is now accepting public comments on AqauBounty’s application until February 25, 2013, after which it will render its decision of whether or not to approve the production and sale of this GM fish.

Take action on AquaBounty’s applications through:

Heidi Osterman is a Kelowna-based certified nutritionist and President of the True Food Foundation.