Spawning Controversy

Opponents Of Proposed Sablefish Farms Charge That Disease And Parasites Will Devastate Wild Stocks. Sound Familiar?

The room is dark and refrigerator-cold. At first the sablefish are invisible from a platform atop a concrete tank, camouflaged in saltwater as inky as the ocean floor. A single bulb dangling from blackout curtains slowly shows dozens of long fish, their frenzied motions reminiscent of small, hungry sharks. Here, in a large, warehouselike building at Salt Spring Island's Sablefin Hatcheries Ltd., swim some of the world's few sablefish broodstock. They are fattened not on the tiny fish, worms, and crustaceans they would normally swallow but on experimental feed pellets that resemble pet-rabbit food.

The sablefish's creamy, white flesh and dark skin has earned it another everyday name: black cod. Just as Anoplopoma fimbria has two competing common names, there are two conflicting visions for its future. One vision, held by Sablefin Hatcheries president Gidon Minkoff and supported by federal and provincial government policy, believes that eggs and milt squeezed from these metre-long fish will help catapult sablefish farming into B.C.'s aquaculture repertoire. Sitting in his hatchery office, Minkoff--a circumspect biologist dressed in faded Levi's and yellow rubber boots--flips open a laptop. He scrolls through pie charts and bar graphs, reciting facts and figures like an eager visiting professor at the podium.

Wild sablefish retail for $10 to $20 a pound (on December 15, Granville Island's Lobster Man was selling smoked sablefish for $18.99 per pound). Minkoff says that 90 percent of Canada's sablefish catch is shipped to East Asia. North American and European markets are poised for development; right now, sablefish is a delicacy only afforded by a lucky few. The facts, he says, all point to one conclusion: "The market potential for this fish is huge," Minkoff says. "Think of the chunky whitefish disappearing off the market--Atlantic halibut, cod, Chilean sea bass, hake. They're practically endangered species."

Like salmon farming, which dominates B.C.'s aquaculture industry, the plan to farm sablefish has become a highly contentious and litigious undertaking, even in its infancy. At the helm of a flotilla of protest groups is the Canadian Sablefish Association (CSA), which represents commercial black-cod fishers who say carefully managed wild stocks could be decimated by disease transferred from sablefish farm net pens. Why, asks CSA executive director Eric Wickham, did the provincial government quietly approve 47 licences for salmon farms to raise sablefish--without public consultation or environmental assessments? "The government is covering its eyes and pretending it doesn't know what is going on," Wickham says in a phone interview. "The only question is what will kill the wild resource: a parasite or a disease? We don't know exactly how it will happen, but we do know that it will happen."

Wild-fisheries interests and environmental organizations are by no means the only groups posing questions about B.C. government approval of sablefish farming. Why, ask Penelakut First Nations elders, did the B.C. government issue a waste-discharge permit allowing Sablefin Hatchery to filter waste through a Coast Salish midden and sacred graveyard? Why, asks Environment Canada's Canadian Wildlife Service, has the hatchery been allowed in an ecologically sensitive area that should be preserved intact?

Even Alaskan governor Frank Murkowski recently waded into the growing debate, dispatching a stern letter to B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell on November 11 asking him to delay the start of sablefish farming in B.C. The proximity of Alaska and B.C., Murkowski wrote, "causes me great concern as I consider the potential danger that sablefish farmed in British Columbia may pose to Alaska's wild stocks and fisheries."

Such worries are quickly dismissed by Minkoff, an international expert on live-food systems for hatcheries. After dreaming for years of running his own business, Minkoff says, he opened Sablefin in late 2003 as a venture-capital corporation, with investors eligible for a 30-percent refundable tax credit. The wild sablefish industry, Minkoff says, is simply "opposed to people going into their market".

In Canada, there are only 48 so-called federal K licences to fish black cod, a catch with an annual landed value anywhere between $16.6 million and $30 million. The sablefish industry, considered to be one of the world's most sustainable fisheries, is so micromanaged that most fish are caught not in nets but in Jacuzzi-sized traps winched up from ocean shelves as deep as 1,500 metres. The traps have two small, bottlelike openings through which younger black cod can escape. Each year, the CSA and the federal Fisheries and Oceans Canada (FOC) hammer out an agreement on the total allowable catch--4,500 metric tonnes in 2004-05.

BOB FRAUMENI, a CSA vice-president who is known as the king of Canada's black cod fishery, says CSA members are not nearly as concerned about sharing a piece of the sablefish pie as they are about preserving wild stocks and protecting the natural environment. Fraumeni's Victoria-based company, FAS Seafood Producers Ltd., hauls in about one-quarter of B.C.'s (meaning Canada's) total allowable sablefish catch. Fraumeni, who will say only that he holds "more than one" sablefish licence, also fishes for other licence holders. (Three FAS-owned boats have sablefish K licences--Nopsa, Nordic Spirit, and Ocean Pearl--according to FOC's Pacific region groundfish-management branch.) He says his business, including the boats, a new packing plant, and a funky retail fish shop, employs about 100 people. The walls of his office, in a recently renovated heritage house overlooking Fisherman's Wharf in the Inner Harbour, are laden with framed photographs of Fraumeni's eight vessels at sea. One large picture, all shades of grey and black and billowing waters, is titled Hurricane on the Black Cod. Fraumeni shot the photograph during a storm in 1993 off the northern Queen Charlotte Islands while he filled the Ocean Pearl's hold with sablefish.

Black cod is only one source of income for the 48 licensees, Fraumeni points out during an interview. The same vessels that catch sablefish during stormy winter months also fish salmon, halibut, and tuna in the spring and summer. What the CSA fears, Fraumeni says, is the spectre of its members joining the jobless ranks of Atlantic Canada cod and halibut fishers. This could happen, he says, if sablefish farming transfers disease or parasites to wild stock, much the way that sea lice outbreaks on salmon farms were cited by the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council as the probable cause of a collapse of pink salmon runs in the Broughton Archipelago in 2002.

At the very mention of sea lice and other fish diseases, Fraumeni leaps up from his seat. His voice suddenly becomes a boom box. He can't sit still. Sputtering and flapping his arms, he gestures to the Inner Harbour, where his fishing vessels moor. "I'm not worried about making money; I know we'll be fine." Fraumeni suddenly composes himself as rapidly as he had shifted into overdrive moments earlier. "I'm worried about destroying our resource," he says, sitting back down. "Black cod is not really the issue. The issue is open-cage, high-density fish-farming. Open-cage finfish farming is known around the world as being bad for the environment."

SABLEFISH WERE LARGELY ignored until the late 1970s, when several Canadian fishers joined forces to find markets and an innovative way--trap fishing--to deal with what had been a bothersome by-catch in groundfish fisheries. Adult fish are normally found in continental-shelf and slope waters at depths up to 1,500 metres. Sablefish range from Baja California to Japan, but most of the world's population is concentrated in northern B.C. and Alaska. The fish spawn from February to April in deep waters along the continental shelf. The fertilized eggs float, and a few months later larval sablefish migrate near shore, where they spend about two years before gradually moving back into the depths.

While in the sheltered saltwater inlets, nibbling at first on plankton while their cells divide and multiply, the juvenile sablefish grow to the human equivalent of young adulthood in a couple of years. Salmon, on the other hand, hatch in freshwater rivers, where they spend the first year of their lives until they metamorphose into saltwater creatures. Some of the same sheltered inlets that nurture juvenile sablefish are home to B.C.'s controversial and disease-stricken salmon farms, dozens of which now hold provincial licences to farm sablefish in open net pens adjacent to salmon cages. Wickham and Fraumeni say that if farmed sablefish catch diseases from farmed salmon and transfer pathogens to wild sablefish juveniles who may visit nearby open net pens for a fast-food snack, stocks risk being decimated by diseases--not just along B.C.'s coast but also in Alaska's waters, a destination for many B.C.-born sablefish, according to Governor Murkowski's letter to Premier Campbell. A November risk-assessment study conducted for FOC concludes that it is not possible to quantify the magnitude of shared disease agents from cultured to wild sablefish. However, "it is likely that there will be an exchange of disease-causing agents between sablefish and salmon reared in captivity at the same site and plausible that there will be an exchange of disease-causing agents between cultured sablefish and wild marine fishes," says the study, British Columbia Sablefish Aquaculture Risk Assessment Based on the National Codes of Introductions and Transfers. The 78-page report, released in December, points out that "we do not know the full suite of diseases to which sablefish will be susceptible."

Notably, the five multinational corporations that control 80 percent of B.C.'s marine-salmon farm sites all mention in company annual reports and other documents that disease on B.C. salmon farms has contributed to slashed profits and production since 2001. Four of these five multinationals hold 30 of the 47 sablefish farming licences. (The exception is Heritage Salmon, a subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate George Weston Ltd, which has 16 B.C. salmon farming tenures but no sablefish farming licences.)

Pan Fish ASA, the second-largest salmon farming company in the world (and which owns the only eight salmon farms in Washington state), sums up the extent of health problems at its 25 B.C. tenures: "What was once an extremely profitable business with low costs and high quality has in recent years been plagued with major problems with disease," says a statement on the Norwegian multinational's Web site. Subsidiary Pan Fish North America, based in Campbell River, holds more licences for B.C. sablefish farming--16--than any other company. Its B.C. salmon farms, like many others, have been stricken by a myriad of diseases, some of which can also be caught by sablefish, according to the CSA and FOC. The industry publication Intrafish reported in 2003 that Pan Fish had tried to farm sablefish in B.C. "before diseases and a poor market caused the company to scale back salmon production". Pan Fish CEO Keith Bullough says in a phone interview that his company has no plans to farm sablefish in B.C. "in the near future". Bullough says that obtaining the 16 licences is only "a matter of regulatory procedure", which will make it easier for the company to farm sablefish in the future should it decide to do so.

ONE OF THE MOST widely reported salmon-farm diseases is Renibacterium salmoninarum infection, a systemic bacterial infection that causes chronic and severe inflammation of the kidneys and other organs. Also known as bacterial kidney disease, or BKD, the infection was reported in 12 groups of farmed salmon during the first three months of 2004, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries' fish-health database. (More than one fish group may exist at a site.) Furunculosis, a bacterial infection of the cardiovascular system that can cause furuncles, or large, bloody ulcers (also called Aeromonas salmonicida infection), was reported to the ministry in 14 farmed salmon groups in B.C. during the first three months of 2004 and in six groups of farmed salmon from April through June of 2004.

Another concern the CSA and Murkowski share is the potential genetic impact of escaped farmed sablefish on wild stock. Sablefish can spawn every year from age five to seven and might live to be 100, while salmon spawn once and die, with a life expectancy of between two to eight years. Although the number of salmon reported escaped from B.C. fish farms has dropped significantly since 58,000 were reported escaped in 2001, according to DFO's Atlantic Salmon Watch Program salmon continue to swim from their cages in the thousands. The latest significant escape in B.C. waters took place in July 2004, when approximately 2,600 salmon exited through a hole in a net pen at a Broughton Archipelago farm run by Stolt Sea Farm, a Norwegian multinational that ranks fourth in the world in farmed-salmon production. Stolt, which has 27 B.C. salmon-farming tenures and seven licences to farm sablefish, said at the time that it had taken disciplinary action against employees who failed to check the net for holes.

Andrew Thomson, FOC's acting senior aquaculture officer for the Pacific Region, says farmed salmon escapes are a big concern because salmon differ genetically from one spawning stream to another. Non-native Atlantic salmon also comprise the majority of fish raised on B.C. salmon farms. But sablefish derive from the same stock whether they hatch in northern U.S. or southern B.C. waters, Thomson says in a telephone interview. "There are no genetic differences between these [farmed] sablefish and wild stock." The FOC risk-assessment study, for its part, points out that "the true escape and survival rates are not known at this time" for sablefish. As for the possible genetic risks of sablefish farming, the report concludes: "The lack of information on the heritability of specific fitness traits and the genetic differences of wild and cultured fish make it impossible to draw conclusions on the potential magnitude of effects at this time."

FOC CLAIMS to have spent $1.59 million on sablefish-culture research since 1996. It has funded private companies through its Aquaculture Collaborative Research and Development Program (ACRDP). A two-year, $96,200 ACRDP grant went to EWOS Canada, a subsidiary of the Norwegian multinational Cermaq ASA, the world's fifth-largest farmed-salmon producer. EWOS, which recently changed its name to Mainstream Canada, holds six licences to farm sablefish on some of its 15 B.C. salmon-farming sites. Most of the Mainstream sites are in Clayoquot Sound, a UNESCO biosphere reserve.

Mainstream planned to use the grant to study the growth and survival of sablefish on diets containing alternate lipid sources to replace costly marine fish oils, according to a 2002 ACRDP news release. One reason that salmon farming has sparked so much controversy worldwide is that it takes three to five kilograms of high-value fish, such as mackerel and anchovy, to produce one kilogram of salmon. Feeding farmed fish has repercussions for other animals and ecosystems as well: Scotland's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds warns that coastal species such as puffins are threatened by the intense harvesting of North Sea fish for animal and aquaculture feed.

The ACRDP gave $312,000 to a B.C. company called Teleostei Hatchery Consulting Ltd., a marine-fish-hatcheries consulting company that initiated a project with two other collaborators: Blackfin Research Limited and Dorcas Point Farms. The three-year project, announced in the same 2002 ACRDP news release, was to examine the reproductive cycle of sablefish and determine the effect of temperature on their spawning cycle. Sablefin Hatcheries' Minkoff is listed as the "contact" on the Web site for Teleostei.com, a marine-fish-hatcheries consulting company. Minkoff is also listed as one of the seven members of the company's "world class team of experts" retained to assist in the provision of services to hatcheries anywhere in the world. Minkoff did not return calls to determine whether or not there is a relationship between Teleostei Hatchery Consulting Ltd. and Teleostei.com.

Federal assistance to private sablefish interests angers the CSA's Wickham, who first heard about the ACRDP funding from the Straight. "It's outrageous," he says. "By law, [FOC]'s primary responsibility is to manage the wild resource." The association pays for its own research, stock assessments, monitoring, enforcement, and management, estimated by Wickham to cost about $1 million a year and funded by members like Fraumeni, who contribute 40 cents for every pound of sablefish they catch. Among other things, Wickham says, the CSA pays almost the full salary of an FOC scientist who studies wild sablefish stocks, the entire salary of the scientist's assistant, about $500,000 a year for two boats with FOC and other researchers to assess stock abundance, and about $250,000 a year for catch-monitoring to ensure annual quotas are not exceeded.

Enforcement of aquaculture regulations, on the other hand, is covered by the provincial government, which in 2004 budgeted $1.06 million for its aquaculture and licensing-compliance branch. In addition, the New Democratic Party provincial government in 1999-2000 contributed $40,000 for research on sablefish early life-stage development at FOC's Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, according to Gavin Last, manager of finfish aquaculture development for the provincial Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries.

Last says sablefish are a "natural fit for culture" as long as breeders get past the tricky stage of coaxing larvae to grow to juvenile fish, using a variety of feeds, ranging from plankton to pellets, at each developmental stage. "Once you get past that stage and you have fish large enough to put in pens in the ocean, they grow beautifully," Last says in a telephone interview. "They grow quickly, they're fairly robust, and the market price is very good for their flesh."

At a policy convention this November, Liberal party delegates voted to support fast-tracking for new salmon farms along the coast and redouble efforts to urge Ottawa to speed up salmon-farm approval. In October 2003, the B.C. government passed Bill 48, which reduces local zoning control over aquaculture, making it more difficult for communities to oppose nearby salmon farms. In December 2003, B.C. Fisheries Minister John van Dongen toured Sablefin Hatcheries on a day-long jaunt that also took him to a salmon farm owned by Marine Harvest, one of the five multinationals that dominate B.C.'s salmon-farming industry and the holder of one sablefish farming licence.

SABLEFIN HATCHERIES, a large building humming with machinery and the soothing sound of running water, will soon be in full operation after winning a plethora of legal challenges. One of the most recent was an unsuccessful attempt by the CSA last July to obtain a federal injunction to prevent the transfer of farmed sablefish to open net pens on salmon farms. This November, the CSA's Wickham says, he discovered that about 10 percent of the sablefish that were transferred to open net pens managed by the independent Totem Oysters in Jervis Inlet had died from furunculosis. Wickham says he can't understand why the province would grant a sablefish farming licence to Totem, which is adjacent to an area favoured by juvenile sablefish. The CSA is calling on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to conduct an immediate investigation.

In November, Penelakut First Nation elders, the CSA, and the Salt Spring Residents for Responsible Land Use lost a key case before B.C.'s Environmental Appeal Board. They argued that Sablefin's temporary waste-management permit should be rescinded because--among other reasons, including health and environmental concerns--discharging waste into a sacred burial ground was disrespectful. (Back in January 2004, the appeal board also rejected the groups' first request that the same permit be withdrawn, saying that potential financial harm to Sablefin outweighed potential harm to the interests of the applicants.) The groups are waiting to see if the province will issue a permanent waste-management permit for Sablefin later this month.

Despite the high number of sablefish-farming licences distributed by the provincial government, only one company, Totem Oysters, is currently farming sablefish, according to the Fisheries Ministry's Gavin Last. Mainstream spokesperson Alistair Haughton told the Straight in an e-mail that although the company successfully grew a "limited" number of black cod to market in 2001, it does not expect to farm sablefish "in the near future". Other salmon-farming companies, too, claim they have no immediate plans to commence sablefish farming. Stolt Sea Farm says it raised a few thousand sablefish about two years ago to assist DFO scientists with research but does not intend to farm sablefish due to the lack of a steady supply of juveniles. "Should they become available we would look at the business case for these fish and take it from there," Clare Backman, environment manager for Stolt's West Coast operations, says in a telephone interview.

That supply may be coming quite soon. Sablefin is the only hatchery in the world devoted purely to sablefish. By contrast, there are about two dozen commercial salmon hatcheries in B.C. Next year, Sablefin expects to raise 100,000 juveniles, of which Minkoff says 30 percent are already spoken for. In 2006, Sablefin plans to sell 250,000 juveniles. Minkoff says he will be able to ship far more black cod to B.C. fish farms in the future: two million annually.

Even though some salmon hatcheries can produce far more smolts, that would still be a pretty big kettle of fish.