By Paul Rudan - Campbell River Mirror
Published: March 04, 2010
Ray Payne of Walcan Seafood pulls out today's sampling of sea lice from farmed Atlantic salmon and holds the jar up to the light.
A few dead lice barely cover the bottom of the small jar which were taken from a random pick of 100 fish which came in from a Grieg Seafood farm located on the west coast of Vancouver Island. And during January and February, the average they found was 0.5-0.7 lice per salmon.
"The impression the world has (of farmed salmon) is it's wall-to-wall sea lice," says Payne, Walcan's production manager. "For perspective, when we get (wild) pink salmon in here, this jar would be filled with sea lice."
Located on the west side of Quadra Island, Walcan's 135 employees process farmed and wild salmon, as well as commercially-raised shellfish, and have been doing so since 1974.
But the company was stunned last month when a video was released by Alexandra Morton, a well-known opponent of open net-pen fish farms, showing Walcan's effluent outflow in Discovery Passage.
The video shows a dark-coloured effluent and some particulate coming from the outfall pipe, located in about 90 feet of water. The narrator describes it as "blood and fish guts," and what alarmed Walcan was the allegation that live sea lice were emerging from the outfall with the effluent.
As well, Morton speculates that sea lice on Grieg's farms in the Esperanza Inlet are becoming resistant to SLICE, the only drug allowed in B.C. waters to treat naturally-occuring sea lice on farmed salmon. As a result, she believes, eggs from the drug-resistant sea lice could hatch and proliferate on the east side of the Vancouver Island.
However, it's a theory based largely on anecdotal stories and very little science. Dr. Sonja Saksida, an aquaculture researcher with the Campbell River-based B.C. Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences, doubts that sea lice could survive the journey, processing and then somehow make it through a screened filter.
Another allegation in Morton's video is there is no 500-micron screen at the end of the Walcan outfall. But it's a blatantly false accusation, says Walcan president and co-owner Bill Pirie.
"They made this clandestine dive out here...if they had only asked us, we would have showed them," he explains Wednesday during a tour of the Walcan operation.
The 500-micron screen - 500 microns is half a millimetre - is located on shore in a large stainless steel container. All water from Walcan's operations are collected in a sump which is then pumped through a rotating drum which is surrounded by the screen.
It's unlikely, says Payne, that sea lice or fish guts could ever make in through as he reaches into the bottom of the drum and pulls out a handful of organic waste, tiny stones, sand and other sea gunk.
This material will be moved to another waste bin and then transported to a composting plant in Nanaimo which uses it to make products like Sea Soil.
And Pirie, along with quality control manager Gerald Murphy, staunchly defend their company's environmental record. Water tests are done daily to check for levels of fecal coliform, acidity and alkalinity, total suspended solids, ammonia in the form of nitrogen, and oxygen content.
"You'd be hard-pressed to find pathogenic bacteria in there," says Murphy, who displays a container of effluent which kind of looks like pink grapefruit juice. "We're regularly at half or less than half all the time of what we're permitted."
In fact, says Pirie, Walcan is diligent in keeping effluent levels well-under minimum guidelines allowed by the Ministry of the Environment and they will continue do even more. In the next two months, the company will install a newly-developed ultraviolet system to treat all effluent, and the UV rays may also be useful to kill any sea lice eggs along with harmful bacteria.
In addition, Walcan hires a third-party environmental company to sample and test effluent, including liquid coming from the outfall.
"We're left to do the real science and we're going to do it," says Pirie. "We're trying to be as proactive as we can. No industry is perfect, but we're installing new levels of controls in order to mitigate the risks."
Valid or not, Morton's allegations have obviously hit a nerve. In response, the B.C. Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences will begin tests this spring to determine if sea lice are becoming resistant to SLICE.
And Pirie says Walcan welcomes innovation and scientific study in order to improve their operations.
"We have an important role. We're a regional processor and there's not a lot around," he says. "We take our responsibilities seriously. We've never been challenged publicly and now our credibility is being challenged...we want people to know what we do here."
Watch Walcan employees process farmed salmon as well as mussels, and see how the 500-micron screen filter works in a Mirror-produced video at www.campbellrivermirror.com
