Salmon farming critics producing junk science
Many so-called “peer reviewed” papers have come out of British Columbia in recent years- most of them predicting doom and gloom for wild salmon stocks as a result of the province’s salmon farms and their production of life-killing sea lice. But recently there has been a case or two where individual journalists have taken the time to do some in-depth investigation into the matters, and a picture is forming of reports having been produced using misleading assumptions and sets of selective data. The National Post newspaper scribes Terence Corcoran and Kevin Libin recently wrote about the fishy science and demarketing of salmon farming in B.C., and these are some exerpts from Mr. Corcoran’s article, How activists, money and manipulated science hijacked the B.C. fish farm industry;
There’s a national science battle underway over salmon. It is a battle over the fate of one part of the salmon industry, salmon farms, and the work of activists who claim to have scientific evidence that fish farms are killing wild salmon and are a threat to the very existence of wild salmon, ocean fisheries and ecosystems. The science conflict, steeped in politics and green activism, has been raging for the better part of a decade. It has many facets, but it reached a climax of sorts in December, 2007, when researchers at the Centre for Mathematical Biology (CMB) at the University of Alberta published a paper that claimed sea lice from fish farms in British Columbia were contaminating wild pink salmon. In a sensational press release at the time, the University of Alberta’s public relations crew declared the coming collapse of wild salmon: “Fish Farms Drive Wild Salmon Populations Toward Extinction.” The release claimed the study — headed by fisheries ecologist Martin Krkosek and including eco-activist Alexandra Morton — proved that pink salmon populations have been rapidly declining for four years. “The scientists expect a 99% collapse in another four years or two salmon generations, if the infestations continue.”
Nothing of the sort has happened. Today, officials report high levels of wild pink salmon in the areas of B.C. where a crisis supposedly loomed. The level of sea lice, a natural parasite, is also declining in both wild and farm salmon. The great salmon farming scare proved to be a false alarm. The CMB science was wrong. Still, the extinction report lingers and dominates public opinion. The 2007 story received global coverage and the research paper, published in Science magazine, became the touchstone for anti-fish farm activists. Public opinion, revved up by junk science, NGO extremism, Hollywood stars and the David Suzuki Foundation, is now reportedly permanently and adamantly so opposed to salmon farming that no amount of counter-effort could possibly change the public mood.
This fish farm science debate, however, never got out of the water in British Columbia. The battle was lost before science got around to working out the facts and reach conclusions. There is plenty of evidence that the sea lice extinction scare is an epic creation of junk science. Thanks in large part to the heroic persistence of Vivian Krause, a lone self-funded B.C. researcher, there is also evidence of what looks like a trail of back-room financial and scientific manipulation that goes back almost 10 years. By Ms. Krause’s estimate, NGOs and other groups and associations supporting the anti-fish-farm effort have received $126-million in funding over the last decade from four U.S. foundations: the Pew Foundation, the Moore Foundation, the Hewitt Foundation and the Packard Foundation. With all this financial backing hitched to a willingness to hype and exaggerate ill-founded science, it’s no wonder the fish farm industry is under siege and the real science issues are all but lost in an avalanche of junk science.
