I don't know why there's the downward trend of salmon over decades. We do know that salmon farming has been around since the 1990s but has evolved. The research I have been involved with has been with some of the DFO collaborators. I believe you've already talked to Simon Jones, who did laboratory studies looking at the resistance of sea lice developed in pink salmon when they're still quite small.
The work I have been involved in is looking at the health of pink salmon in the environment. My big concern is that a lot of the research that has been going on has concentrated on sea lice and not on the holistic salmon and always equating infection with disease. We all know that an infection doesn't necessarily mean disease.
Over a couple of years we did a study where we looked at pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago and we evaluated them for health and tried to associate that with the sea lice infestations. We're preparing a manuscript that's being submitted now. In general, our findings were that during the two years we looked at, the prevalence of sea lice was not high enough to affect any population levels. Certainly some factors were seen histologically to indicate that there might be some kind of nutritional or toxic exposure to these animals that might affect their ability to survive.
The interesting finding we had--