First of all, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you this afternoon, if only on television. I appreciate the amount of trouble some people have gone to to arrange this.
I'm a professor of ecology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and I've been doing research on salmon and other marine species for over 40 years. I've published over 140 scientific papers, and my work has been recognized through my election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Together with my graduate students I've written several scientific papers on sea lice. I've also served as a member of the BC Pacific Salmon Forum's scientific advisory committee, and I helped to design their Broughton ecosystem research program. I also co-wrote a major report on sea lice and aquaculture for the World Wildlife Fund. I think I can be called a credible scientist, a point I will return to a little later.
In the ongoing debate about the effect of sea lice on wild salmon, it's easy to be confused by the claims and counterclaims, especially when the press reports them as being equally valid. However, some of these claims--mainly those by credible independent scientists--are far more likely to be true than the opinions and half-truths you hear from spokesmen for the aquaculture industry, with their clearly vested interests, or from scientists who work for agencies, whether provincial or federal, that are mandated to support aquaculture.
If I may be excused for a moment for sounding like a professor giving a lecture, I think it's important to explain just what is meant by science. The best definition I've heard is that science is a way of knowing. It's a process by which we come to understand the natural world. A scientist is someone who uses the scientific method to gain this understanding. Incidentally, one doesn't have to have a doctorate, honorary or otherwise, to be able to do that.
The basic scientific method involves proposing a hypothesis to explain a phenomenon and then seeking information to refute it. This might come from observation or, in the best-case scenario, from an experiment. If we cannot refute it, we feel more confident that our hypothesis is true, but we don't say that it's proven. We accept it and continue to try to refute it with new tests. If all the results of all our tests and observations agree, then we become pretty confident that our hypothesis is true.
We then have to communicate this new knowledge to other scientists, and that's where it becomes difficult. We write it up as a paper, and we send it to a journal. They assign anonymous referees, who pick our work apart and try to find reasons not to publish it. If we're lucky, we may have to make only a few minor changes before the paper is accepted. If not, they may require major changes, or they may reject it outright. The better the journal, the more difficult it is to get a paper published and the more confidence other scientists can have in its conclusions.
Now, I mentioned that in an ideal world, the best way to test a hypothesis is by experiment. For example, if we think that effect A is related to some putative cause B, we remove cause B and see what happens. This is easy to do in a laboratory but is very difficult to do in the field. Fortunately, in the Broughton Archipelago, experiments of this sort have actually been done twice. In 2003 there was a provincially mandated fallow of the farms, and the adult pink salmon returns the following year rebounded. From 2006 to 2008, the farms started treating their fish just prior to the out-migration period of the wild fry. Again, this caused fewer lice on the juveniles and dramatically increased adult returns. This is actually very strong evidence for a farm effect.
That's where we are with sea lice and wild salmon. All the information we have supports the hypothesis that sea lice are produced in large numbers in open-net salmon farms, that in their infective stages they attack the juvenile wild salmon swimming by, often in high enough numbers to kill them, and that this causes the wild stock of salmon to decline.
This is my assessment. It is based on my own work and that of others, including, especially, Dr. Martin Krkosek, whom you heard from last week. His work, it's worth noting, has been published in the very best journals in the field, those with the highest reviewing standards. His conclusions and those of others, including mine and Alexandra Morton's, should not come as any surprise. Exactly the same thing has happened virtually everywhere in the world where salmon farming in open-net cages has been practised, whether in Norway or Ireland or Scotland, so contrary to the absolute nonsense claimed by provincial veterinarian Mark Sheppard, there are a rather large number of credible scientists, me included, who disagree with him when he says that there is insufficient information to suggest that lice on farms is affecting Pacific salmon in a detrimental way.
I said earlier that science never proves anything absolutely. There is always a small element of uncertainty; it may be very small, but no matter how small, it's inappropriate to seize on this uncertainty to discredit the work. Seizing on uncertainty is a common tactic of people who don't want to believe the results, from those who deny climate change to tobacco companies. It's a bogus argument. The conclusions that scientists are coming to are more than strongly enough supported that DFO should be invoking the precautionary principle and getting the salmon farms out of the migration routes of wild salmon.
Thank you very much.