Regarding the lights, you are correct, they cause the lice to reproduce, and they also attract fish to the problem area. So they are a big problem.
When I first discovered the sea lice problem in 2001, they were infecting 99% of the juvenile salmon in the area. Over time, the salmon farming industry has been on the case, and they are now treating their fish with the drug SLICE. However, they are treating their fish every single spring, which is certainly going to make drug resistance happen. But they have to do that to reduce the lice. In the last two years there has been a concerted effort by the fish farmers to treat at the right time, and they have brought the lice down to a level where we were able to get a couple of generations through. We had a look at the pink salmon that were being treated with the drugs last year, and from Campbell River to the area where I live, Broughton, they looked really clean.
What this tells you is that the Norwegian salmon farming industry has become the gatekeeper to our fish. If they clean up their lice problem, we get fish back. Of course, we don't know what their bacterial and viral problems are, but they also have to be considered. It bothers me that industry, and in some cases government, has used last winter's pink salmon returns to argue that wild fish can survive with these salmon farms. That is not the case at all. The salmon farms are the bottleneck that our fish are going through, and as soon as they deal with their lice, we get fish back. The problem is that the drug is a temporary solution.