Mmmmm!!!! Enjoy Your "Responsibly Farmed" Salmon, Now With 1,550% More Sea Lice!! [View all]

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In early September the independent non-profit Aquaculture Stewardship Council increased the amount of sea lice allowable on farmed salmon that is certified as “responsibly farmed.” B.C. farmed fish are now allowed to have three motile (or 0.6 to 1.7 adult female) sea lice on them, when they used to only be allowed 0.1 mature females to qualify for the label. Motile sea lice is an umbrella term for pre-adult and both male and female lice. This is a 540 to 1,550 per cent increase in the total allowable parasite limit. Advocates say this won’t change anything in practice on B.C. fish farms because most farms were given exemptions from ASC sea lice limits and were operating under Fisheries and Oceans Canada limits, which are three motile lice per fish.

Sea lice are parasites native to B.C. that attach themselves to salmon and eat the fish’s mucous and skin layer, says Sean Godwin, a post-doctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University who specializes in sea lice. These parasites add stress to a wild fish, make them more susceptible to be eaten by predators and slow down their growth rate, he says. Sea lice impact farmed salmon less because the fish are protected from predators and are regularly fed, he adds.

In their juvenile stages sea lice drift through the ocean in hopes of finding salmon to attach themselves to. Wild salmon shed the lice when they return to fresh water to spawn because sea lice cannot survive in fresh water, Godwin says. Because adult wild salmon tend to swim up rivers in the fall and juvenile salmon swim down rivers in the spring, sea lice transmission between the young and older fish are naturally prevented.

Salmon farms house a lot of fish — sometimes over one million salmon — in very close spaces “which provides the ideal conditions for pathogens and parasites to proliferate,” Godwin says. Farms act as “year-round reservoirs” for sea lice which then expose juvenile salmon to “high numbers of sea lice” as they swim close to farms during their migration. “It’s the juvenile salmon we worry about because they’re smaller and lack fully developed scales and immune systems to help protect them,” he adds.

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https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/10/14/Eco-Label-Sea-Lice-Certified-Farmed-Responsibly-Salmon/