Fisheries committee  Great. First of all, can you hear me?

Fisheries committee  It's a pleasure to be here today. As a bit of background, I am a professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. I am a biologist, specifically a physiologist, who studies how animals adapt to different environments and, in essence, how animals work.

Fisheries committee  The two areas we've mostly focused on are the effect of alternate diets--that is, increasing plant-based food sources in diets for rearing salmon--and looking at the effect of sea lice on juvenile pink salmon, which has been an area of concern in British Columbia in particular. So through our work on sea lice, I guess there are implications for ocean stocks.

Fisheries committee  I think the real challenge is that we need a lot of information to make inferences on how wild stocks are being affected. In order to study the impact of something like aquaculture or any anthropogenic activity on the environment, we must first have a thorough understanding of the baseline conditions.

Fisheries committee  That's great. Our research has focused solely on the oils. Other people have been looking at proteins, so both of them are important. In terms of our work on oils, we were interested in chinook salmon early in development, and we found that we were able to replace up to 75% of the anchovy oil in the diet with canola oil, and there was no negative effect on growth, no negative effect on swimming performance and their ability to transfer from fresh water to sea water, and their ability to tolerate low oxygen tensions.

Fisheries committee  I think that's a great question. If we think of the wild stocks that currently exist, many of them are being fished close to maximal capacity. Some are in decline, others are doing reasonably well. But I think we are approaching a point at which we are limited in the amount of fish that we can draw from the ocean to, in this case, convert into fish pellets.

Fisheries committee  I would imagine there would be. One of the bigger challenges of eating an animal that lives in a very different environment is that its composition could be very different. But fresh water fish have a fairly similar composition to sea water fish in terms of their ion content, for example, which is something we're quite interested in.

Fisheries committee  That's a great question. There are a number of reasons. The researchers more than the university per se are interested. Several of us are really interested in what limits the performance of fish. We do a lot of work studying how animals adapt to different environments, and the possibilities are quite amazing.

Fisheries committee  Yes, absolutely.

Fisheries committee  Sure, and that's a great question. Part of what we've been thinking a lot about is that with increased populations, we need more protein, and fish is a valuable source of protein. If we want to provide that protein source through fish, then you have the wild fisheries or you have aquaculture.

Fisheries committee  First, the facility is quite an impressive one. I think that one of the biggest challenges, as you've heard from many people, is probably the cost of closed containment. Many of the people at the Freshwater Institute are engineers and are very well versed on the proper technology or the cutting edge technology on cost.

Fisheries committee  Certainly, one of the debated topics within closed containment is that you have tight control over disease, and if you're treating the effluent that leaves that facility, you have the potential for no disease entering the environment, which is really quite good. In terms of animals that come into the facility, they're generally hoped to be disease-free.

Fisheries committee  That's a great question. As a university, we're interested in all sides of the equation. Our focus has mostly been in British Columbia, because that's where we're based, and we interact with basically all aspects. So we include industries that are predominately open net pen, which are generally receptive to at least the concept but wary about the economics of it, through to other groups that are very interested in closed containment as a sole source for aquaculture.

Fisheries committee  That's a great question and, obviously, people are very interested in the answer. From the people I've talked to who are doing research on density effects on fish performance, it seems the biggest determiner of density effects is actually indirect, through water quality. So it seems that as long as you can keep the water quality good, you can have quite high densities.

Fisheries committee  When you say “social”, do you mean in terms of the public or in terms of the fish in those systems?