It's True. North Pacific Marine Mammals Dying Off.

It was barely a week ago that I spoke with a fellow at Fisheries and Oceans Canada about the ecological devastation sweeping the Pacific Northwest and, in particular, coastal British Columbia.

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.