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Author Topic: Another day another virus scare.  (Read 20988 times)

Dave

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #45 on: April 23, 2012, 06:14:26 PM »

There's another contributor to these discussions on aquaculture that unfortunately, for his own good, should not respond.  This guy is a well spoken and very know ledgable young biologist with a well known agency; an agency that wrongly dictates it's experts not speak publicly on fisheries issues.
Let's leave him be so we can all gain from his future posts.

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Sandman

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #46 on: April 23, 2012, 07:03:55 PM »

We can agree to disagree in our opinions but we do need to be sure that we are working with the same set of facts.

In order to understand it, you need to look at the whole picture, not just single aspects taken out of context and interpreted according to a set of parameters based on personal bias.

We will pretend that you do not have personal bias, but I do.

There is some deposition directly beneath the farms but it is undergoing a continuous process of breaking down to constituent elements; that breakdown is accelerated by site fallowing. If there are creatures that find the environment less than ideal, they simply move 100m to an environment essentially unaffected by the deposition; consequently, diversity in the benthic substrate immediately under the pen is somewhat reduced but overall diversity within an area is unaffected. That is not a permanent condition, nor one that is particularly harmful, nor one that affects the seabed a stone's throw from the pens.

This, of course, assumes that the surrounding area can support the additional organisms and that the carrying capacity of the surrounding area is not already reached.

Arguing precisely how many farms fit into Stanley Park is a sidetrack that has nothing to do with the point being made, though having done the actual calculation of area occupied by the farms in the past, I'll stand by my assertion that all farms will fit within the Park. The point, once again, is that the farms use an extremely small area of the coast and that because of oceanographic conditions, physical principles, biological principles and the nature of the materials being deposited, the depositions are not causing harm nor are they a cause for concern.

Again, if it is true that the deposits are not causing harm and are not a concern, why the recommendations from scientists, like Pusceddu et al, that farm be located at a minimum of 2k from vulnerable sites? While I totally understand your argument that the affected area is small compared to the overall size of the coastal sea bed, but I have a hard time understanding how a reduction of abundance and biodiversity in an ecosystem is not harmful.  If the micro-, meio- and macrobenthic organisms are reduced in number or diversity, that is going to have an impact on the mega faunal organisms further up the food chains as the organisms that might feed on these organisms are reduced and the organisms that feed on those organism are reduced and so on.  So while it is fine to say that "creatures that find the environment less than ideal . . .[can] simply move 100m to an environment essentially unaffected by the deposition," the reality is this may not always be possible, and this itself would have an impact on those neighbouring areas, which would now see an increase in populations that may exceed its own carrying capacity.  If I clearcut a forest ecosystem, I can make the same argument that the organisms (ie: squirrels) that find the clear cut "unsuitable" can all just move over to the neighbouring forests, but we know that is not necessarily the simple move you make it out to be, as the surrounding forest may already have reached its carrying capacity for food, shelter, etc.  Furthermore, while you insist that the current number of farms is not going to increase, and therefore the area that they affect is going to remain low and "insignificant," I still do not accept that there will be no expansion of salmon farming.  I simply wonder at what point is the area affected no longer "insignificant"?  How will we know when that point is reached?  Will farmers be willing to close up shop at that point?  This is why I used the reference to how we once viewed the oceans and atmosphere.  We all understand that throwing a glass of freshwater into the ocean is not going cause a measurable effect, and I see that this is how you currently view the impact of salmon farms on the coast sea floor (you admit there is an impact, but it is "insignificant" when viewed in the context of the total sea floor).   However, what happens when the atmosphere warms to a point where the Antarctic ice sheet all melts and that freshwater is added to the oceans?  Is there a measurable impact?  Just ask the billions that live within 50m of sea level.  I see the same for salmon farms.  You may be right that the loss of biodiversity due to the salmon farms is insignificant today, that there is enough biodiveristy in the surrounding seafloor to make any losses caused by the farms to be "insignificant," a cost of doing business, but then where do you draw the line?  How many more farms can be added before their impact becomes "significant"?
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absolon

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #47 on: April 23, 2012, 10:54:51 PM »

What more do you need than this what I posted above, maybe you missed it. ;D ;D



 Of course I have been retired for 14 years and worked in highway engineering for 35 years  for the Provincial Government.

You can google my name for more I guess. ;D ;D ;D ;D


Actually Chris, what you've just offered is what I was looking for. I'm aware of at least some of your activities with respect to the rivers, and I applaud you for them, but I was looking to get a broader picture. I did try Binging you (I'm off Google these days) and I got a Wikipedia page in your name. I figured it wasn't you though. It said that guy died in 1805. I also got a lot of links to social media pages in your name, but I don't do social media so I'm not sure if they were yours.
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absolon

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #48 on: April 24, 2012, 12:12:48 AM »


The salient point is "looking at the whole picture", not single aspects in isolation, and particularly not single aspects chosen to support one's biases. For example, carrying capacity is not static and doesn't exist in isolation. Rather, it exists within a system constantly subject to varying inputs and outputs. The animals moving into the new areas are inputs, as is the increase in nutrient loading from the farms and they both increase the carrying capacity of the adjacent areas. The system rebalances itself constantly; it doesn't breakdown as a consequence of changes on the scale that farms cause. Claiming that the sky is about to fall because small changes occur ignores the need to look at the whole system in order to arrive at a real understanding of the dynamics and the realistically possible outcomes.

Pusceddu et al. studied farms over soft bottoms and sea grass beds in the warm-water, minimal tide Mediterranean and concluded they couldn't identify the specific causes of causes of changes to the sediment biochemistry. I'm not sure how you can be so certain in you conclusions about our area based on their work.

I've never suggested there will be no new farms. I have pointed out that, contrary to your representations, any growth will be slow, responsible and well regulated.

Quote
We all understand that throwing a glass of freshwater into the ocean is not going cause a measurable effect, and I see that this is how you currently view the impact of salmon farms on the coast sea floor (you admit there is an impact, but it is "insignificant" when viewed in the context of the total sea floor).   However, what happens when the atmosphere warms to a point where the Antarctic ice sheet all melts and that freshwater is added to the oceans?  Is there a measurable impact?  Just ask the billions that live within 50m of sea level.  I see the same for salmon farms.

........irrelevant hyperbole........
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jon5hill

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #49 on: April 24, 2012, 05:21:43 AM »

Ok.... I told myself I would stay out of this and I did a good job for a while, but I'm finally done my interviews, my finals, and all my papers and need something to do and the post above kind of irked me so here we go...

1) Sources for this information? I read that whole paper and saw 2 papers quoted... would you consider that reliable? I can just as easily sit behind my keyboard right now and type a paper that long with my own points on how theoretical modelling proves that salmon farms don't have an impact on wild fish and that sea lice are not an issue. Just because a paper is published in a journal doesn't mean it is a good one.

2) Next point... lets re visit that theoretical model. I seem to recall a model produced a few years back saying all pink salmon would be extinct by last year due to sea lice infestation.. Don't remember it? I'll gladly go re find it for you if you would like to argue how accurate theoretical modelling can be.

3) I still have yet to see a single paper that adequately proves that sea lice from farms are killing wild salmon. First off, how can you prove that these fish are getting the sea lice from farms? Many of the studies conducted take their samples hundreds of km's away from farms, yet the farms are the problem? If you expect me to believe that they get infected with the sea lice at farms and then swim hundreds of kilometres away from the farm, how does that prove to me the sea lice are even killing the fish?

Now to go further into the point above. Please don't qoute Morton's and Routledge's paper on the effects of sea lice on pinks and chum. First of all, they used beach seines and hand nets to catch heir fish. Weak and infected fish are slower and come to the top = easier to catch and see = biased results. They also held their barrels off a dock in warm surface water. Stressed and weak fish from capture will always die given more stress, and you're also keeping the fish in a contained environment where they are not able to escape sea lice. If their study encompassed a wild population I might be more prone to believe it. I also might be persuaded into believing their papers if they hadn't predicted that all pink salmon would be virtually extinct by the year we happened to have one of our biggest runs ever.

Here's a paper to read on sea lice not effecting swimming speeds, etc (hopefully you can see it as I'm using library data base), paper info :
Nendick, L. et al. 2011, Sea lice infection of juvenile pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha): effects on swimming performance and postexercise ion balance.

http://dd6db2vc8s.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/summon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Sea+lice+infection+of+juvenile+pink+salmon+%28Oncorhynchus+gorbuscha%29%3A+effects+on+swimming+performance+and+postexercise+ion+balance&rft.jtitle=Canadian+Journal+of+Fisheries+and+Aquatic+Sciences&rft.au=L+Nendick&rft.au=M+Sackville&rft.au=S+Tang&rft.au=C+J+Brauner&rft.date=2011-02-28&rft.issn=0706-652X&rft.volume=68&rft.issue=2&rft.spage=241&rft.externalDBID=CJFS&rft.externalDocID=2286046451

4) Lastly.. once again you guys are on the topic of being fed antibiotics and pesticides. First of all, they are not fed pesticides, besides SLICE, which is not even needed, it is used as a precautionary method to stop sea lice from spreading to wild salmon during migration. This doesn't pollute the water, it goes directly into the salmon's skin to deter sea lice from attachment. The part about antibiotics, if you read the quote from me above... The average amount of anti-biotic's administered per 1 metric tonne is just over 500g... and only 10% of that is actually administered to net pens, the rest is administered to brood at contained sites.

5) Last thing.. Believe me when I say that fish waste does not pile up below farms. They select sites based on high current velocities so that waste, blooms, etc do not have a large effect on their fish. These sites must also have very high flow rates to provide oxygen to the high biomass. As said above, one of the reasons they place sites on high current sites is to flush waste. There may be minimal piling up of waste, but it is no where near what many activists make it out to be. And don't give me the sludge argument... what do you expect to find at the bottom of the aphotic zone of the ocean.... I would gladly take a look at a bottom sample you provide from 100 km's away from any location at the same depth, bet the sample will be the same.



You clearly have never beach seined a school of salmon fry. You don't just get the weak ones. You get the entire school. This isn't the first time you have spoken with no supporting evidence with regard to something. I have helped conduct beach seines for Alexandra Morton's long running data set up in the Broughton, and I can assure you that you have obviously no idea what you are talking about. The fish are sampled correctly, subsampled randomly. The other methods involve killing all the fish. You are going to be one lousy scientist if you use the conjecture you use in public dialogue in academic circles.. people will laugh at you.
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alwaysfishn

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #50 on: April 24, 2012, 07:26:22 AM »


You clearly have never beach seined a school of salmon fry. You don't just get the weak ones. You get the entire school. This isn't the first time you have spoken with no supporting evidence with regard to something. I have helped conduct beach seines for Alexandra Morton's long running data set up in the Broughton, and I can assure you that you have obviously no idea what you are talking about. The fish are sampled correctly, subsampled randomly. The other methods involve killing all the fish. You are going to be one lousy scientist if you use the conjecture you use in public dialogue in academic circles.. people will laugh at you.

Let's chock Every days post up to the naive enthusiasm of youth.....  or another pro feedlot farmer that has his blinders on.   ::)
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Dave

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #51 on: April 24, 2012, 08:25:50 AM »


You clearly have never beach seined a school of salmon fry. You don't just get the weak ones. You get the entire school. This isn't the first time you have spoken with no supporting evidence with regard to something. I have helped conduct beach seines for Alexandra Morton's long running data set up in the Broughton, and I can assure you that you have obviously no idea what you are talking about. The fish are sampled correctly, subsampled randomly. The other methods involve killing all the fish. You are going to be one lousy scientist if you use the conjecture you use in public dialogue in academic circles.. people will laugh at you.
Talk about people laughing … I have considerable experience with beach seining and catching all of a school of anything the size of pink fry would be a rare event and totally dependent on the substrate.  If you were seining over sand with no wave action I might buy it but, if Ms. Morton did indeed “sample correctly” that would be a first for her as all her other sampling exploits have shown.
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aquapaloosa

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #52 on: April 24, 2012, 08:37:46 AM »

Quote
You clearly have never beach seined a school of salmon fry. You don't just get the weak ones. You get the entire school. This isn't the first time you have spoken with no supporting evidence with regard to something. I have helped conduct beach seines for Alexandra Morton's long running data set up in the Broughton, and I can assure you that you have obviously no idea what you are talking about. The fish are sampled correctly, subsampled randomly. The other methods involve killing all the fish. You are going to be one lousy scientist if you use the conjecture you use in public dialogue in academic circles.. people will laugh at you.

  Textbook morton camp mentality.  We're right, your wrong, we can not be corrected and are not looking to make improvements by collaborating with other scientists.  We are not learning we are the educators.



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alwaysfishn

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #53 on: April 24, 2012, 08:50:25 AM »

  We're right, your wrong, we can not be corrected and are not looking to make improvements by collaborating with other scientists.  We are not learning we are the educators.


Sounds like a description of the feedlot crowd.....
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jon5hill

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #54 on: April 24, 2012, 01:23:58 PM »

Talk about people laughing … I have considerable experience with beach seining and catching all of a school of anything the size of pink fry would be a rare event and totally dependent on the substrate.  If you were seining over sand with no wave action I might buy it but, if Ms. Morton did indeed “sample correctly” that would be a first for her as all her other sampling exploits have shown.

Dave, no doubt your venerable 37+ years of experience in fisheries is of great value in this dialogue. I would like to point out several circumstances which may further clarify my defense of Alex's sampling methodology. The fish are sampled at fork lengths ranging from 27mm to about 110mm, at which point they commence sounding and beach seining becomes a much trickier task. In the early season (late March-early April) mean FL values were around 34mm, and close to mid July they approached 90mm. Further, fish on the larger end of this spectrum, in the later part of the migration (75mm+) tended to aggregate at 'points' rather than 'bays', making matters more difficult due to increased wave action and precipitous terrain from which to stand. For most of the outward migration of juveniles, fortunately, these fish were usually located in and around sandy bays which was helpful in making schools of fish easier to sight, and having less wave action in general. Juveniles in the ~30mm to ~100mm size range aggregate in the photic zone in the water column, which is in congruence with both my visual assessment and the literature (Groot & Margolis, Quinn, McPhail). Presumably because this is the zone of high planktonic growth, and the less tumultuous nature of water in bays yields more likelihood of bonanza-style-bloom events. These provided conditions upon which fish could seen, targeted, and trapped with high degree of precision and accuracy. School sizes, especially at the smaller end of the scale tend to be smaller on average than what is observed in the later stages of juvenile growth. This made targeting schools relatively simple at this stage as they were significantly smaller than the beach seines used to trap them. The effects of sampling at the turning of the tides, where tidal forces were instantaneously zero during the sampling period provided water surface conditions such that sighting schools of fish (with the aid of polarized sunglasses) was a simple task. In the case that wave action that day was too harsh to sample, (gale force conditions usually) we simply sampled the following day. Also in the event that no schools could be targeted (which was quite rare), we would conduct a blind set. From my own experience, and the conditions outlined above, it should be easier to see why I have confidence in the sampling methods used with beach seining, and how they are as close as we can get to a representative sample of fish. I certainly have never observed, nor do I get the impression from the literature that parasitized juveniles exist in a subset of fish that is skewed in their favor.

Hopefully this elucidates my position.

PS - Not sure if you were referencing me or not with a previous post in this thread, but my association with an employer would not prevent me from speaking my mind about anything. I care about fish way too much to put my ideas aside in favor of a job.
« Last Edit: April 24, 2012, 01:28:49 PM by jon5hill »
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jon5hill

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #55 on: April 24, 2012, 01:27:54 PM »

0
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Dave

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #56 on: April 24, 2012, 01:57:40 PM »

Thanks Jon, your observations do indeed add clarification. Was it you or AM who set the sampling protocols?  If indeed it was Alex I am pleasantly surprised but wonder how she forgot the lessons learned in her later excursions.

No, I was not referring to you in my previous post.  This person also cares about fish but is not allowed to speak publicly to many issues.  Although I doubt he would be fired, he does have a young family to support and could certainly be reprimanded by Ottawa.  IMO, he is more valuable to all of us who care about these things by sitting on the sidelines, using a false name. Sadly, DFO is becoming almost military in it's pathetically poor public relations department. 
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chris gadsden

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #57 on: April 24, 2012, 02:45:19 PM »

Thanks Jon, your observations do indeed add clarification. Was it you or AM who set the sampling protocols?  If indeed it was Alex I am pleasantly surprised but wonder how she forgot the lessons learned in her later excursions.

No, I was not referring to you in my previous post.  This person also cares about fish but is not allowed to speak publicly to many issues.  Although I doubt he would be fired, he does have a young family to support and could certainly be reprimanded by Ottawa.  IMO, he is more valuable to all of us who care about these things by sitting on the sidelines, using a false name. Sadly, DFO is becoming almost military in it's pathetically poor public relations department. 
This is the sad part as things that should get out to the public are being muzzled, that is why so many are concerned about FF's as we are not getting all the truth on what actually is going on. Thankfully we have people like Alex and many others, like Jon trying to get the truth out, especially in these days of lack of transparency by many levels of governments. Without them we, and the fish are in serious trouble on so many environmental fronts.

Sandman

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Re: Another day another virus scare.
« Reply #58 on: April 24, 2012, 08:15:40 PM »

I'm not sure how you can be so certain in you conclusions about our area based on their work.

I am not certain at all. I have not seen such extensive studies done here in BC. I am just wondering how you can be so certain that salmon farms are NOT harming the areas here when the work done else where suggests they have a negative impact on the sea beds.  I have always maintained that the studies should have been done first, before the open net pens were allowed to operate here.
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