DFO and operator attribute mass die-off to low oxygen, but one scientist who visited one far-flung site in a kayak worries the real cause could be more complicated.
On June 1, Stan Proboszcz loaded up his kayak and caught the ferry from his home in Powell River to Comox on Vancouver Island. The ensuing two-hour drive would take him past snow-crested peaks and deep forested valleys until he reached a boat launch in Gold River.
Before Proboszcz left, a colleague had tracked a number of boats that were allegedly bringing fish all the way around the south end of Vancouver Island and into the Nanaimo area. But the boats had nearly finished shuttling all the fish, according to the anonymous source. A vessel, Knight Dragon, appeared to pump something out of the farm, while another hose appeared to be discharging water from the ship into the open ocean.
“The worst of the worst cases are getting larger,” Gerald Singh, a researcher in UVic’s School of Environmental Studies and the study’s lead author, said at the time. In June 2022, Murray said she would move to phase out salmon farms on B.C.’s coast to protect wild juvenile Pacific salmon migrating through the area.
McCorquodale officially told Proboszcz the die-offs were not isolated to a single farm, but “that elevated levels of mortalities have been occurring recently among farmed fish at farm sites in Clayoquot Sound, Port Hardy, Clio Channel, Esperanza, and Nootka,” the email reads. Sea lice treatments put on hold, says company DFO biologists and veterinary staff travelled to Nootka Sound. They “confirmed that the mortality events were caused primarily by environmental conditions: extremely low oxygen events and harmful plankton in the marine environment,” wrote the spokesperson.
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