To clarify that, in the fall period at the end of each summer, the wild Pacific salmon come in with heavy loads of lice. I don't know whether you've had the opportunity to come and fish in that period of time, but beautiful silver, robust Pacific salmon come in, and it's not uncommon to see 40, 50, or 80 lice per pink salmon or chum salmon. They bring them to the coastline each year. That's what's unique about B.C. compared with other areas in the world.
I think what you're referring to, sir, is the debate about whether the farms have lice and whether they transmit those lice outward to the small Pacific salmon fry. That is the $64-million question, if you will.
It's no secret that the Atlantic salmon inside the farms will receive lice, and there can be amplification of the populations of those lice inside the cages. In general, in B.C. those numbers are in the ones and tens per fish, as opposed to what others like to compare with—Norway, Ireland, Chile—where the numbers are in the hundreds per fish, or even east coast Canada.
So these are very low numbers. We've set the number of three lice per fish as a trigger value, a very precautionary and very rational number to deal with. In most cases, throughout the year the average on farmed fish is fewer than three. It does rise above that in the fall and winter periods. That's not a problem. What we do is try to minimize the amount of lice on the farmed fish in the springtime period in order to minimize the risk of any transfer of lice to the small fry, which may be sensitive to the lice.
The argument has become, again, is it happening? Are the lice moving from the farms into the wild fry, or are the wild fry getting these lice from another source?