Our discussion focused on a report in The New York Times about a contagious form of cancer that was believed to have originated in Bay mussels on the BC coast. The report claimed that this strange cancer had spread to South America and had been found in the blue mussels common to French waters.
I had to wait a few days for my calls to be returned. When I was contacted the federal agency's response was dispiriting and reflected how broken Ottawa's DFO has become.
The fellow who called must have just read the NYT article. He babbled on rather foolishly. He was reading it as we babbled. He said really foolish things, sounding like Martin Short's character, the greasy lawyer, Nathan Thurm. Ah, there were so many species of mussels and the article was vague. No, I pointed out, it was quite specific - "bay mussels." He then hummed and hawed. He then tried to slough it off, telling me to take it up with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
I then turned to another report about an infectious disease that had migrated through the newly opened Arctic waters from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific and was said to be devastating our marine mammals. Nonsense said this idiot, we're awash in marine mammals.
All I had to go by was a recent drive up the coast in search of signs of life, especially sea lions and otters. I couldn't find a trace. That's certainly not conclusive and maybe this DFO doubtful starter was right. Then I stumbled across another article, this time in The Guardian, about a form of distemper that has indeed migrated from the North Atlantic into the North Pacific.
“There’s long been concern that melting Arctic sea ice could allow disease to pass between the Atlantic and the Pacific,” Tracey Goldstein, an expert in marine animal diseases at the University of California, Davis, and one of the lead authors of a report, said. “Now here we are.”
Phocine distemper virus, or PDV, has long been a threat to seal populations in the northern Atlantic, along with several strains of influenza, but had not previously been identified in the Pacific. It was first recognised in 1988 following a massive epidemic in harbour and grey seals in north-western Europe with a second event of similar magnitude and extent in 2002. The 1988 outbreak killed thousands of Britain’s seals.
The virus attacks the immune system, leaving animals susceptible to pneumonia and in the most severe cases can kill a seal within 10 days of infection. The two outbreaks, which both started on the Danish island of Anholt in the Kattegat strait, killed about 23,000 harbour seals in 1988 and 30,000 seals in 2002. The virus is believed to spread through contact between infected individuals and has killed animals in the waters of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the UK and Germany.Okay, so Ottawa's fisheries agency is asleep at the switch on shellfish cancer and marine mammal distemper. Is there anything else they can fuck up? Why, yes indeed. How about the completely unnatural disaster backed by DFO, fish farms?
Bonny Glambeck, campaign director of Clayoquot Action, said that members of her organization recently spotted divers at work and biowaste containers being loaded with dead fish at Cermaq’s Binns Island salmon farm near Ahousat.
A similar clean-up operation was observed at the adjacent Bawden Bay farm.
“They are still netting out dead fish at a tremendous rate and putting them into mort bins. The die-off is causing a tremendous amount of pollution in the ocean,” said Glambeck. As the dead fish decompose, their scales and body parts float around the ocean.
Water around the farms had turned from blue to “a dark brown muddy river-like colour,” she added.
Typically, each ocean-pen confined feeding operation contains about half a million Atlantic salmon and produces nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich sewage equivalent to a city the size of 180,000 people. The effluent contains feces and uneaten fish food.
The algal bloom die-off follows two years of sea lice plagues that Cermaq could not control with pesticides or mechanical de-licing equipment.
“Cermaq’s operations are caught in a vicious cycle of sea lice and die-offs, said Glambeck. “We’ll see if the [federal] Liberals keep their election promise to move this industry into onshore tanks by 2025.”
Harmful algal blooms, which have caused the farmed salmon industry billions of dollars in recent years, have expanded their range and frequency as climate change has warmed, acidified and robbed coastal waters of normal oxygen levels.I would call Ottawa's Department of Fisheries and Oceans to ask for their take on this but recent experience shows they're not likely to have one. Let's put it this way, the Canadian Coast Guard or what remains of it excepted, Ottawa is not a force for good on the British Columbia coast.
8 comments:
The phrase "of Biblical proprtions" comes to mind, Mound.
There will always be part of the population of every species that has a resistance or immunity to the latest contagion. If the die-off isn't too extensive, populations can rebound eventually.
The greater problem is that a lot of these species are having to cope with multiple changes and threats from disease migration to the arrival of invasive species fleeing hotter waters to the south, algae blooms and oceanic heatwaves, to changes in the established aquatic food chains.
It doesn't help when DFO seems indifferent to what's going on under their noses.
The DFO even lacked the courtesy to supply the guy assigned to return the call with any suitable stock answers. I wonder why they bothered. It must have been a really slow day. Pathetic.
I got the feeling years ago after giving up on making any representations to government agencies that deal with issues of privacy and consumer protection that, rather than that they were providing me with information and guidance, I was educating them.
John. Believe me. I was talking to this guy.
https://youtu.be/FOLBQxk72NY
Presently in S. Korea...."More than a million tonnes of contaminated water has accumulated at Fukushima's destroyed nuclear power plant and the only solution, the government says, is to release the water into the ocean to dilute it." This has already happened in the past according to my Korean friends here. No doubt this is one reason fish have and are devoping cancer and other health problems. Canada's attitude is going to come back and bite it in its arse no doubt and people wonder why the S. Koreans, N. Koreans and other Asians don't like the Japanese. In Japan most of the population do not know what is happening. Anyong
Oh, Anyong, that's just another bit of grist for the mill. We have arrived at a period of chaos and it's going to go badly for a great many people - very, very badly for some.
Once the sea life is dead, we humans won't be far behind. How can we ever expect the DOF to do anything or know anything, when theyre headquartered in Ottawa. All of them out to be required to walk at least 100 miles of the each of our 3 coasts and not in urban areas. they've got their degrees and their jobs, but no practical experience. Some ought to be required to work out on the ocean before having a desk job.
A new article informed us this week, the sea life in the Artic Ocean had plastic particles in them. I believe it were beluga whales which had been part of a food fishery for Inuit.
Once these animals have these diseases, there will be a good chance it will be transmitted to human, we do remember mad cow disease don't we.
EAF - DFO has a splendid headquarters on the waterfront in West Vancouver. Quite the compound. Harper did his best to break them, especially the research guys who did the monitoring of the marine ecosystem. Entire units were shut down, their staff terminated. DFO was realigned to serve the private interest rather than the public interest.
British Columbia's fisheries are a public asset. I don't care how big your trawler is, those aren't your fish. We issue licences to permit the commercial boats priority access to those fish but it's the public, not the fishing industry, that funds the hatcheries, the Coast Guard and even the DFO.
What frosts by backside is that, once they have their holds full, the public has no say. BC prawns, that were once available to $12 a pound suddenly skyrocket to $40 or more because of a fish die-off in Asia. Then we're left to watch as even fashionable restaurants take them off the menu because they're too expensive for BC consumers. That's just wrong.
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