Fisheries committee  Yes. One of the things that we have done is develop a means to measure different kinds of stress in hatcheries as well. The way that we culture fish is fairly without habitat, essentially, and one of the issues that has come up is that hatchery fish don't behave the same and don't survive the same as a wild fish.

Fisheries committee  Well, our finding is for Tenacibaculum. Mouth rot is the disease caused by Tenacibaculum in farms. The work we did was after the CSAS process, so they did not have the same level of information available to them when they performed the CSAS process. I do think it is important, and as was said in every CSAS process, as new information arises, new scientific data, they will reconsider the level of risk that they have determined in the CSAS.

Fisheries committee  I was personally involved only in the PRV CSAS and my colleague Andrew Bateman was involved in the Tenacibaculum, so I can't really speak to what went on in the room with all nine of those. I can say that in the PRV CSAS, they were very heavily reliant on the challenge studies that have been performed in DFO.

Fisheries committee  First nations are critical because they are on the ground and have years and years of history witnessing the changes we are studying today. My program is working extensively with first nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island and in the Broughton Archipelago. We hope hoping to utilize their history of knowledge to better understand where we need to focus our efforts in understanding stressor and historic patterns in population.

Fisheries committee  Sure. I really do believe that the FIT-CHIPs will give us the new resolution that we've never had before. Previously, we could go out and measure temperatures, and we could go out and measure environmental conditions, and we could surmise that they might be impactful on salmon. The FIT-CHIPs actually offer an opportunity to look at the salmon themselves and allow the genomic signatures of the salmon to speak for themselves.

Fisheries committee  One of the things we need to better understand is where the bottlenecks are and in which areas along the coast and in the rivers climate change is having its greatest effect. We know that, in freshwater systems, when we have premature mortality of returning adult salmon, they are most likely to die in the areas where they're experiencing prolonged periods of high thermal stress.

Fisheries committee  Absolutely.

Fisheries committee  I do believe that the information is provided to managers—certainly to managers in direct line of authority from me. Whether the information I provide is actually going to the resource managers is not something I'm aware of. I don't handle those briefings.

Fisheries committee  I don't know which research you're talking about, but we have published 50 papers from the SSHI in the last six years.

Fisheries committee  Absolutely. Our PRV papers have been published with the same vets that have originally described HSMI in Norway. One of our lead vets is a very predominant pathologist out of Europe.

Fisheries committee  That's correct. These are enhancement hatcheries.

Fisheries committee  We have not looked a lot at community-based hatcheries. We've looked at some, but we have seen that particular virus coming out of hatcheries on the east coast and west coast of Vancouver Island and in the Fraser River.

Fisheries committee  Those are really good questions. We have picked up Pacific salmon nidovirus in farmed chinook salmon. We know it's on Pacific salmon farms. We also have picked it up in the odd returning adult wild fish, so it is out there. The thing that's really different about this particular one is that we rarely detect it in wild salmon coming out of fresh water.

Fisheries committee  For one thing we actually get fish from the hatcheries. We take samples of fish before they've released them. After that, you're absolutely right; we are only able to use the adipose fin clip to identify if it as a hatchery fish or not.

Fisheries committee  Back in 2012, I undertook a study with a chinook farming aquaculture company that was looking at whether jaundice anemia, as a disease that was causing overwinter mortality on farms for over a decade, was caused by environmental factors or by a virus. All of the work—the genomics, pathology and epidemiological work—pointed to the activity of a virus.