News, Notes & Fishy Quotes
The following is an email sent to STS and forwarded to me from a concerned reader. The information was so good, I felt that it was in other readers’ best interest to run it in its entirety. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this, Brad.
My name is Brad Crowther and I live in Mission, B.C. Over the last three issues of STS I have been reading Josiah Darr’s reports in “News Notes and Fishy Quotes” about ISA virus, the very low sockeye numbers in the Skeena, and the Salmon Industries Sustainable Farming Initiative. I would like to give you a perspective of what is going on here.
Two years ago I met independent biologist Alexandra Morton taking samples of pre-spawn mortality sockeye in the Harrison River, a good size tributary of the Fraser River. My wife and I offered to help Alexandra any way we could, and since then have volunteered any way we can when asked. We have seen the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), and the Federal and Provincial Governments do anything they can to cover up the scientific findings of Alexandra’s research.
I’ll start with the August issue of STS. Josiah has written that the Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife did testing for ISA virus and found none. Oh, do I hope that is the case and you don’t have ISA there, but from what I have seen here, in the lower Fraser, it would be a miracle if it’s not there. What happens is when all the salmon smolts migrate out of their tributary streams in the spring (basically anywhere lower than Port Hardy on Vancouver Island) they have to swim past large numbers of salmon feed lots in narrow channels. When they do this, the smolts are subjected to all the pathogens coming from the farms. From there they head to the Gulf of Alaska where they come in contact with ALL species of salmon smolts from the entire West Coast. You can see that it is unlikely this virus problem will only be confined to B.C. I sincerely hope you can trust the WDFW to tell the truth, because that certainly is not happening here with DFO, the CFIA, and both levels of government. The tests used by Alexandra’s lab will detect any strain of ISA virus—even pieces of the RNA sequence of the virus.
The tests used by the CFIA looks only for known strains of ISA. If the virus has mutated, CFIA would miss it. Seven labs have detected parts of the ISA sequence in B.C. This concerns me. We need to know why if we want to be sure wild salmon are not affected.
Next, in the September issue, Josiah writes about dangerously low sockeye return numbers in the Skeena. A couple things I can tell you about that are: As of the end of September, they are experiencing almost a 100% pre-spawn mortality in the Babine. This has been a problem in some Fraser River tributaries but it’s the first we have heard of it in the Skeena system.
Second, in 2010 the Fraser experienced the largest sockeye run since they have been counting, estimated to have been around 30 million fish; many of these commercially caught fish were sent to Prince Rupert to be processed, right at the mouth of the Skeena River. All that processing waste would have ended up in the water. The adult 2010 sockeye swam through and then entered the lakes where juvenile sockeye were rearing. Those juvenile salmon are the generation that have gone missing and are dying before spawning…just like the Fraser sockeye. This does seem to be more than a coincidence.