You can’t be both researcher and activist
In a chronicle for the Norway-based internet news organization IntraFish, professor Atle Guttormsen with the Institute for Economy and Resource Management at the University for Environment and Biosciences in Ås, Norway suggests that when an institution like Morton’s organization describe what they do as “..research and publication of the devastating impact of Atlantic salmon farming...”, it makes it very difficult to take any of her research seriously.
Professor Guttormsen’s statement to IntraFish can be translated as follows;
On Monday the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS among insiders) published an article with the following crystal clear conclusion: “ Sea lice from fish farms have no significant effect on wild salmon population productivity”.
The study looks at the situation in Canada and the results can obviously not be transferred directly to Norway. The article has received deserved attention in both Norway, USA and Canada. The researchers behind the study are very respected scientists without links to either fish farmers or the “anti-salmon farming” lobby. The study is thorough, and the researchers have gained access to data that have not formerly been analyzed. Myself I can’t understand that this can be anything but good news, and that we all should be happy. The fish farming companies in the region (among them many Norwegian) are obviously also happy to be found “not guilty” for their sometimes serious accusations.
The reactions from some of the most eager critics of salmon farming are however quite different, if even not unexpected. Most well known in this regard is the biologist and activist Alexandra Morton. She has earlier published works about farmed salmon, lice and wild salmon. (Ed. note; to obtain a title of Registered Professional Biologist (RPBio) which Ms. Morton has, one has to have produced one published paper and be sponsored by two other RPBio’s). But she is at least equally known as a bone-hard anti-fish farming lobbyist and activist.
As a researcher I see great research ethical challenges associated with the way Morton is working. On the one side, she wants to be a serious researcher with her own research institute and many scientific publications. At the same time she has an obvious agenda and definitely has not the truth-seeking curiosity that should characterize a good researcher. The research institute that she leads describe what they do this way: “...research and publication of the devastating impact of Atlantic salmon farming...”, and has according to my opinion disqualified itself. It also makes it very difficult to take her research seriously.
Morton has obviously difficulties with the swallowing of the results in the PNAS-study. Not the least because it goes against many of her own results. The day after the study came out she posted a blog notice where she attacks the study and quite interestingly “turns around” the burden of evidence. It is now all of a sudden the responsibility of the fish farming industry to find the reasons for the fluctuations within populations of wild salmon.
