I would expand that to a pathogen explosion, because a lot of fish farmers now come to me directly; they talk to me and tell me what goes on in these farms. I, unfortunately, can't do much with that information because they don't want to be revealed. They won't tell me the exact site sometimes. The impression I have very clearly is that there are large bacterial and viral outbreaks on these salmon farms.
There was a paper written by Dr. Sonja Saksida that described a massive outbreak of the virus IHN from 2001 to 2003, which infected 12 million farm salmon. The Fraser sockeye swam through that, and that was the 2005 generation that crashed so badly.
Now, the really key thing about those Fraser sockeye is there's a pattern we should be reading. All of the stocks that have been genetically observed going north past Campbell River and the 60 salmon farms from there to the open ocean are in steep decline. The one stock that is observed genetically going out from the bottom of Vancouver Island--they're called the Harrison--is actually increasing. If you pull back your focus, the Somass River coming out of Alberni Inlet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, goes by no salmon farms, goes straight into the Pacific Ocean. That run of sockeye came back at more than twice what DFO forecast. As well, from the Columbia River to the south, and the Okanagan River, which feeds into the Columbia, those sockeye go straight into the Pacific Ocean. They're in the same latitude, and they did extremely well. They passed no fish farms.
That pattern, to me, says (a) there was a serious problem in the eastern coast of Vancouver Island, and (b) that's where all the salmon farms are. We absolutely need to know what pathogens were on those farms or we will never answer this question.
There are also processing plants spewing blood water into these areas. Some kids went down and videoed the Walcan one on Quadra Island. They put my plankton net right over the end of the pipe, and like it or not, they bottled it all up and put it in a cooler for me to check. Coming out of that pipe were sea lice hatching. They were actually alive. It's the first time I've actually seen sea lice hatch. So that suggests viruses and bacteria are coming out of that pipe, too.
All of that is so incredibly risky to our Fraser sockeye. The fact that only those stocks that are going through that area are in decline is a huge warning sign. If we really want to protect those fish, we need to pull those farms out right now and just test and see what happens. At the very least, we need to know exactly what was going on in them.