As far as farmed salmon density goes, one thing that we've learned from the ecology of infectious diseases, epidemiology, is that disease dynamics are highly sensitive to the density of hosts. When you crowd animals together, or crowd people together, diseases tend to break out.
What this means is that there may be some things, like critical host density thresholds, where, within a region like the Broughton Archipelago, if the regional density is relatively low, there may be fewer disease problems. When the density is very high, there may be a lot of disease problems.
It's very difficult to say where that threshold might be, but I would say that it's likely a factor. It might be a reason why a place like the Broughton Archipelago transitioned from a place where we did not have sea lice problems to one where we do now. A similar thing has also happened in the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, where, as the density of farmed fish increased, suddenly sea lice emerged as a problem. It wasn't a gradual shift. It was a sudden shift.
As far as the position of DFO and DFO science is concerned, there's insufficient evidence to conclude that there is a problem with sea lice and Pacific salmon. I would disagree with that. I think there's ample evidence to indicate that we have a problem. I think there's ample evidence to indicate that the problem is a lot bigger than we think it is. It's more expansive spatially to other areas of British Columbia, as well as to other species of salmon. That would be my position.
