Those are very good questions, Mr. Kamp.
To begin, the grow-out period for typical Atlantic salmon that get into the cages would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 to 24 months. At the outset it would be 24 months, or maybe 18 to 22 months. It depends on water temperatures, etc.
I said it's used up to two times in that grow-out period. You can imagine that when the small fish come from the hatchery into the ocean in the fall, they're exposed to that influx of lice from new Pacific salmon, so sometimes those small fish, which we call smolts, are treated with Slice before March to reduce any lice load that those small smolts have. The goal is to minimize the amount of lice on the farmed fish in the period from March 1 to June 30, which is the wild fry out-migration period. Those small fish may get exposed once to Slice. The second treatment on that same group of small fish is not likely to occur until the next winter, so on average it's once per year.
Does that answer that question?
In terms of the decline in use of Slice, it is unfortunate you didn't get these graphs, because we monitor this very closely through the province. The graph indicates that the amount of Slice has been declining over the years. What you cannot see, which is very important here, is the scale, which ranges from zero to 1 gram of active ingredient per metric tonne of fish. In 2008, 0.2 grams of the product was used per metric tonne of fish. I can tell you that in 2009 that declined to 0.15 grams. To put things into relative perspective, you'd be hard pressed to get 0.15 of a gram on your fingernail. It's just such a tiny amount of Slice that is used in B.C.
Your third point, Mr. Kamp, was that the information that doesn't generally get out there is that over the last five or 10 years the production of Atlantic salmon has gone up, the mortality has decreased, the lice abundance has decreased, and the use of the control product has decreased. This control product is not used because the farmed salmon need it; it's largely to meet the social expectation of the farmers, the industry, and the province in trying to do what they can to minimize the abundance of lice or the risk of lice transferring into those wild fry in that spring period.