Carry on? Okay.
So it's a low-dissolved oxygen situation. Again, it's a natural situation that happens every year. It's my understanding that in the Pacific northwest there is a low-oxygen dead zone, if you will, of dead water, which comes to shore sometimes. So in that period of time, fish can be killed or...but certainly they can't be fed very well, because that will kill them.
In addition to that, when you have a lot of sun and sometimes a little bit of rain, harmful algae blooms will develop. Again, that can either kill your fish, or, as they certainly can't be fed, the farmers leave them down in the bottom; they don't want to entice them up to the top. In that period of time of June, July, August, September, some farms literally cannot feed their fish very much. Instead of feeding them the normal 30 or 31 times a month, they may only get 7, 10, or 15 days of feeding in.
So those are some of the environmental factors. What's happened now is that you have a group of animals who haven't really had access to feed very much and as a result they haven't grown. That would explain why we have undersized fish now, and it can wreak havoc with someone's harvesting and marketing schedules. That was the case here, where you had a group of fish that had just been sort of maintained for several months.
In addition, if you start looking at population dynamics, a pecking order will develop, just as it will among a group of chickens, for example. You will have aggressive fish that will get the feed, and they'll grow a little bit, but because there's a bimodal population, you will also have another group of fish that just isn't doing well. These fish go by a number of different names--poor doers, slinks, or just basically subordinate fish that are marginalized in the population in every pen.
So by the end of October, hasn't been raining, so the salinity of the ocean will have been increasing. The salt content, as far as I can tell, was at a record high in that area. Lice really like high salt content. So you have waves of Pacific salmon coming in with their lice; you have fish that aren't feeding; you have perfect salinity conditions; and you have lice getting into the farms and multiplying there. By the end of October, it looked like the fish were going to start feeding again. So the veterinarian—and I applaud him for his very diligent activity and judicial use of the product—set up a seven-day medication period for the fish. The medication was fed for seven days at the end of October. Cameras were used, as they are in every pen, to make sure that little or no medication fell through. Sure enough, the entire amount of medication, 100%, was consumed by the fish that were eating, and that's the key. Again, you can imagine that you have a prescription of Slice eaten by 80%, for argument's sake, of the fish, and that Slice worked very well to reduce the numbers of lice to next to nothing on those robust fish that had access to the feed. You also have another 20% of the fish that were marginalized and didn't have access to that medicated feed. The lice would remain on those fish not exposed to Slice.
So what happened was that shortly after the Slice medication was given, the concentration of that product in the mucous and the skin started to decline over a number of weeks. As it declined, you can imagine that the lice from the subordinate fish were now looking to move back over onto the robust fish. The same thing happens with the lice from the ecology, the other waves of Pacific salmon coming through that area, or with the resident lice on small fish, like sticklebacks, for example. So there are a number of sources of Slice-free lice that are now moving back onto those fish that had been medicated in the last month or two.
That's where you see an increase. You have likely seen some of the graphs. There was an increase in lice, and instead of seeing a nice flat line after that, you see an increase again. That would be the explanation for that: they are not Slice-resistant. Credible and objective scientists have looked at all of these factors.
We went out to visit the site. I went out personally at the end of January to assess the situation and the farm was following all of its requirements, exceeding all of their requirements. I applaud the veterinarian for doing what he did, because at that point there was tremendous pressure to keep throwing drugs at those fish in order to control that situation. But they realized that it's just not going to work when we only have one in-feed product. How can one in-feed product be effective when you have animals that aren't eating it?
That's why the decision was made, the multi-million dollar decision was made, to start to harvest undersized, under-marketed fish to get them out of the system. Quite frankly, it's sort of what everybody would like to have done, but it certainly didn't come across as being praised.