Fisheries committee  Well a lot of viruses coming from fish farms are also naturally occurring. We have to be careful about thinking that they are two completely separate things. In terms of.... I'm sorry. I've just lost track of what your question was.

Fisheries committee  Tenacibaculum.... Sorry, sorry, sorry. Tenacibaculum is not going to be an easy one to control because Tenacibaculum is found in marine fish, as well as salmon and farmed fish. It isn't only found in farmed salmon. The issue with farmed salmon is that it may be considerably increased in terms of the abundance of Tenacibaculum released into the water column.

Fisheries committee  It's completely new, yes. Our first publication on the merging of tracking studies with non-lethal physiological samplings came in the science paper that I published back in 2011. That was the very first time this kind of technology had been utilized. Our technology has evolved a lot since then and our genomic technology is much more targeted to specific signatures of stress and disease.

Fisheries committee  I certainly hope so. I do have some funding from the Pacific Salmon Foundation to continue in that level of research. I know that the Pacific salmon strategy has a placeholder for that kind of work, but whether or not that work actually gets funded, I don't know yet.

Fisheries committee  Well, it's a bit self-serving for me to say so, but yes, I do.

Fisheries committee  I believe the question to me was about what I would say if the minister suggested that there was no more than a minimal risk and, therefore, would reverse the decision on the farms in the Discovery Islands. My response was that since the CSAS's were concluded—not very long ago—we have new data.

Fisheries committee  I think that we need to get away from the idea that simply pumping out more fish from hatcheries is going to reverse the declines. I think that we need to recognize that the marine environment is where the year class strength for many of these populations is determined, which means that the marine environment is where we need to consider taking the most action.

Fisheries committee  We did a little bit of work with the early version of our FIT-CHIP a couple of years ago. One of the things that we did see in the fish was a shift in the timing of osmoregulation. Because the virus infects the gill—and we've been able to show that through viral imaging under the microscope as well as our molecular work—we are concerned that the virus may disrupt the ability of fish to shift to becoming full smolts.

Fisheries committee  I think one thing that could potentially help that's been happening for the last couple of years, in part from the department's work on PRV, is getting the hatcheries to make sure that they're disinfecting their eggs as much as they can to remove the potential for viral transmission, vertical transmission, from the females to the progeny.

Fisheries committee  Well, one of the difficulties that Norway has in studying disease impacts in wild fish is that there are so few fish out there for them to capture and study. They've been limited to looking at migrating adults that are returning to spawn or at juveniles that are going out, but they are really unable to catch fish in the ocean because they're just not dense enough.

Fisheries committee  About two and a half years ago we discovered the nidovirus. We did a study where we looked at the distribution of the nidovirus in the Quinsam system, where we had samples in the hatchery, both of wild fish and hatchery fish. We followed them through their migration out into the marine environment and first observed the nidovirus in wild fish after they'd come in contact with hatchery fish in the early marine environment.

Fisheries committee  We are trying to establish a baseline. One of the ways you can determine how long a virus may have been here is through sequencing. You look at the depth of the sequencing phylogeny for the virus, and we do know that there are different variants. We do see some depth in the sequences that suggest that they've been here for a period of time.

Fisheries committee  If you're talking about minimal risk to sockeye salmon specifically in the Discovery Islands, I would say she should give pause and not make that sort of declaration until we have fully ironed out the role of Tenacibaculum in the sockeye salmon declines.

Fisheries committee  There are many different types of evidence. Certainly one that wasn't explored in the CSAS was the sea lice. Simon Jones talked about that briefly here. Certainly there are challenges with resistance to the drug and the ability of the industry to keep the lice levels down. In terms of the work that we've done, our evidence centres around two pathogens—PRV and Tenacibaculum—but we're not done.

Fisheries committee  The increased survival of hatchery fish...?