Maybe I should begin with a normal Slice treatment in British Columbia.
Again, British Columbia is in a very unique situation. The lice are very much under control. Slice is only used approximately one time each year. So its infrequent use, first of all, is not conducive to the development of resistance. It's a very effective drug normally.
What happens is that new batches of naive lice come back on the wild salmon, and they seem to be readily transferred into the farming system, usually beginning sometime in August or September. Normally at the farm site a veterinarian will continue to monitor that situation, and will finally write a prescription to medicate that population of farm fish--sometimes in November, sometimes December, sometimes January. In the winter months, that's when the lice numbers have accumulated, compared to the rest of the year.
Within a month or so after that treatment, the lice numbers normally drop to next to nothing. Without any further challenge of lice...which is the normal case in British Columbia, because as I said, the resident availability of lice usually doesn't begin again until September. So after that Slice treatment, the farmers in British Columbia normally have the opportunity to have effectively a louse-free or very low louse count, often below one per fish, for anywhere from three to six months, until again they're challenged with lice when the next batch of Pacific salmon comes through in late August or in September.
If I can take you back to June 2009, a different scenario was set up in one particular area of British Columbia. It was a very dry year with very little rain. In June, July, August, what happens on the west coast, the outside coast of Vancouver Island, is that the farms often suffer from what's called a “low-dissolved” oxygen....
Is that phone for me?