Protecting Canada's Pristine Pacific Northwest Coast - B.C. 'BILLY-style
Yes, and did we mention that 'BILLIES in B.C.'s capital, Victoria, proudly pour RAW (untreated) sewage into the ocean? You're surfin' in it now!
SIGN here to make them stop.
Beyond the Outer Shores
The Untold Story of Ed Ricketts, the
pioneering ecologist who inspired John
Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell
Hardcover
By non-'Billy Frostback Eric Enno Tamm |
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Having depleted the ocean, we are now trying to domesticate it by "farming" fish. The U.S. government is even proposing new legislation to privatize the ocean within the two-hundred-mile Exclusive Economic Zone by promoting fish farnming in much the same way that pioneers settled the West. In the words of one newspaper reporter, who obtained a draft of the proposed legislation, "Look out at the boundless ocean, and envision a new Iowa - homesteaded by fish farm colonies... with row upon row of undersea cages roiling with swimming livestock."
Today, the outer shores of the North Pacific represent a tragic microcosm of the world at large. In British Columbia, pristine inlets are being turned into the aquatic equivalent of industrial feedlots with thousands of fish crammed into tiny floating pens. The fish are particularly susceptible to disease and sea lice infestation, are fed pellets and dyes to color their flesh, and contain a level of toxic PCBs seven times higher than in wild salmon. Production from this type of industrial salmon farming soared from 15,500 tonnes in 1990 to 89,000 tonnes in 2002, while wild salmon catches plummeted.
What remains of the wild fisheries, including groundfish, black cod and halibut, among others, are being privatized. The fish in the ocean are being divvied up into individual quotas owned by corporations and so-called "arm chair" fishermen who trade and lease their quotas for profit. Tenant fishermen, not unlike the tenant farmers depicted in The Grapes of Wrath, often pay usurious "rents" equivalent to 70 percent of the revenue from their catches to the quota owners. Poorer rural and aboriginal fishermen have been pushed off the sea, as quota holdings are consolidated in the hands of a rich few. Of the 1,006 quota licences in B.C., for example, only thirteen are owned by people living on the outer shores of Vancouver Island.
A billionaire businessman, Jimmy Pattison, now owns more fishing licences than all these communities combined.
... Are we slaves to a great industrial machine, or "monster" as Steinbeck called it, or are we a species living in mutual dependence with our natural environment? It seems we have failed to heed the one biological truth so evident in the various writings of Ricketts, Steinbeck and Campbell: humans, like other animals, live in communities. Our traditional knowledge, connection to place, dependence on clean air and water, and intergenerational bonds are part of a lifecycle that has allowed us to thrive in nature and persevere despite history's travails. Destroy this organic entity or try to replace it with the harsh mathematics of a corporate ledger or sever a community's connection to the land and sea, and you'll ultimately destroy what makes us human. We will become the brutal machines we have created. (From Epilogue, pgs-. 313-314))
More on the 'Billies' dubious fish management efforts at Ecotrust Canada.
Stain Upon the Sea
West Coast Salmon Farming
Paperback
By S. Hume
Foreward by David Suzuki
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EurekAlert!
Press Release
Fish farms drive wild salmon populations toward extinction
Experts raise serious concerns about the expansion of industrial fish farming
Contact: Matt Wright
Dec. 13/07
A study appearing in the Dec. 14th issue of the journal Science shows, for the first time, that parasitic sea lice infestations caused by salmon farms are driving nearby populations of wild salmon toward extinction. The results show that the affected pink salmon populations have been rapidly declining for four years.The scientists expect a 99% collapse in another four years, or two salmon generations, if the infestations continue. (see summary and links below)
“The impact is so severe that the viability of the wild salmon populations is threatened,” says lead author Martin Krkosek, a fisheries ecologist from the University of Alberta. Krkosek and his co-authors calculate that sea lice have killed more than 80% of the annual pink salmon returns to British Columbia’s Broughton Archipelago. “If nothing changes, we are going to lose these fish.”
Previous peer-reviewed papers by Krkosek and others showed that sea lice from fish farms can infect and kill juvenile wild salmon. This, however, is the first study to examine the population-level effects on the wild salmon stocks.
“It shows there is a real danger to wild populations from the impact of farms,” says Ray Hilborn, a fisheries biologist from the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “The data for individual populations are highly variable. But there is so much of it, it is pretty persuasive that salmon populations affected by farms are rapidly declining.” According to experts, the study also raises serious concerns about large-scale proposals for net pen aquaculture of other species and the potential for pathogen transfer to wild populations.
“This paper is really about a lot more than salmon,” says Hilborn. “It is about the impacts of net pen aquaculture on wild fish. This is the first study where we can evaluate these interactions and it certainly raises serious concerns about proposed aquaculture for other species such as cod, halibut and sablefish.”
The data are from the Broughton Archipelago, a group of islands and channels about 260 miles northwest of Vancouver that is environmentally, culturally, and economically dependent on wild salmon. To pinpoint the effect of salmon farms, the study used a large dataset collected by the Canadian federal government’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Fisheries and Ocean Canada) that estimates how many adult salmon return from the ocean to British Columbia’s rivers each year. Extending back to 1970, the data covers 14 populations of pink salmon (Onchorhynchus gorbuscha) that have been exposed to salmon farms, and 128 populations that have not.
Sea lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) are naturally occurring parasites of wild salmon that latch onto the fishes’ skin in the open ocean. The lice are transmitted by a tiny free-swimming larval stage. Open-net salmon farms are a haven for these parasites, which feed on the fishes’ skin and muscle tissue. Adult salmon can survive a small number of lice, but juveniles headed from the river to the sea are very small, thin-skinned, and vulnerable. In the Broughton Archipelago, the juvenile salmon must run an 80-kilometer gauntlet of fish farms before they reach the open ocean.
“Salmon farming breaks a natural law,” says co-author Alexandra Morton, director of the Salmon Coast Field Station, located in the Broughton. “In the natural system, the youngest salmon are not exposed to sea lice because the adult salmon that carry the parasite are offshore. But fish farms cause a deadly collision between the vulnerable young salmon and sea lice. They are not equipped to survive this, and they don’t.”
Salmon bring nutrients from the open ocean back to the coastal ecosystem. Killer whales, bears, wolves, birds, and even trees depend on pink salmon. “If you lose wild salmon there’s a lot you are going to lose with them – including other industries such as fishing and tourism,” says Krkosek.
“An important finding of this paper is that the impact of the sea lice is so large that it exceeds that of the commercial fishery that used to exist here,” says Jennifer Ford, a co-author and fisheries scientist. “Since the infestations began, the fishery has been closed and the salmon stocks have continued declining.” (emphasis added)
“In the Broughton there are just too many farmed fish in the water. If there were only one salmon farm this problem probably wouldn’t exist,” Krkosek says.
“Over the years the number of farmed fish has increased,” says Morton. “There used to be only a few farms, each holding about 125,000 fish. But now we have over 20 farms, some holding 1.3 million fish. The farmed fish are providing a habitat for lice that wasn’t there before.”
The researchers observed that when farms on a primary migration route were temporarily shut down, or fallowed, sea lice numbers dropped and salmon populations increased. “Even though they have complicated migration patterns they all have one thing in common – overall, the populations that are declining are the ones that are going past the farms,” says Mark Lewis, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Alberta.
“There are two solutions that may work – closed containment, and moving farms away from rivers,” says Lewis. Closed containment means moving the salmon to pens that are completely sealed off from the surrounding environment in contrast to the open-net pens currently in use. In a May 16, 2007 provincial government report, the B.C. Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture recommended a move towards closed containment within 5 years.
“If industry says it’s too expensive to move the fish farms or contain them, they are actually saying the natural system must continue to pay the price,” says Daniel Pauly, Director of the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre, who was not involved with the study. “They are, as economists would say, externalizing the costs of fish farming on the wild salmon and the public.”
Morton, who has been studying the impacts of aquaculture for 20 years, says that, “Wild salmon are enormously important to the ecosystem, economies, and culture. Now it is clear they are disappearing in place of an industry. People need to know this and make a decision what they want: industry-produced salmon or wild salmon.”
Science:
14 December 2007
Vol. 318. no. 5857, p. 1711
DOI: 10.1126/science.318.5857.1711
Rather than benefiting wild fish, industrial aquaculture may contribute to declines in ocean fisheries and ecosystems. Farm salmon are commonly infected with salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis), which are native ectoparasitic copepods. We show that recurrent louse infestations of wild juvenile pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), all associated with salmon farms, have depressed wild pink salmon populations and placed them on a trajectory toward rapid local extinction. The louse-induced mortality of pink salmon is commonly over 80% and exceeds previous fishing mortality. If outbreaks continue, then local extinction is certain, and a 99% collapse in pink salmon population abundance is expected in four salmon generations. These results suggest that salmon farms can cause parasite outbreaks that erode the capacity of a coastal ecosystem to support wild salmon populations.
1 Centre for Mathematical Biology, Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
2 Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
3 Biology Department, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
4 Salmon Coast Field Station, Simoom Sound, BC, Canada.
* Deceased.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mkrkosek@ualberta.ca
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