By Roy L Hales
Wildlife biologist Alexandra Morton has been wanting to get a close look at the salmon inside a fish farm for years. She got her opportunity on August 23, when the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw nation boarded Marine Harvest’s Midsummer fish farm in Kingcome Inlet, BC. The video below shows what Morton found after lowered a Go Pro camera into the pens for ten minutes. She calls this hard evidence from the inside.
Continue reading Hard Evidence From The InsideAlexandra Morton’s struggle against fish farms has made her a folk heroine in British Columbia. Two years ago, she approached the legal firm ecojustice with a report that aquaculture company Marine Harvest Inc. had transferred Atlantic salmon infected with piscine reovirus (PRV) into net pens located along the Fraser River salmon migration route. On May 6, 2015, they won what Morton calls a victory for wild salmon.
Continue reading A Victory For Wild Salmon
Alexandra Morton followed a pod of resident Orcas up the coast of Vancouver Island in 1984. She found the ideal base for further studies at Echo Bay. When the first fish farms moved into the area three years later, she thought they were a good idea. Since then, she has becomes the foremost opponent of British Columbia’s fish farms. I recently interviewed Alexandrea Morton on fish farms.
Continue reading Alexandra Morton on Salmon FarmsAs many as 70 million sockeye salmon may return to the Fraser this year. These numbers have not been seen for decades and are quite a stark contrast to 1.6 million catch that sparked the Cohen commission a few years ago. That was when Dr Kristi Miller, head of Molecular Genetics at the Department of Fisheries and Ocean’s (DFO) Pacific Biological Station, testified that a ‘viral signature’ of a disease was contributing to as high as 90% pre-spawn mortality in returning Fraser sockeye. One of the reasons there is so much hope for this year, is the returning 2010 run were not infected. But, according to biologist Alexandra Morton, the real key to fighting for the future of BC’s fisheries is Dr Kristi Miller’s lab in Nanaimo.
