Week 2: The Scottish Parliament’s Rural Affairs & Islands Committee salmon inquiry roadshow has moved on to week 2. During this latest session, committee member Emma Roddick asked the most pertinent question so far. Speaking to Charles Allan of the Fish Health Inspectorate she said:
“It’s really great to hear farms are doing well and sea lice numbers are going down. It’s a different story to what others have been telling us these last couple of weeks. Do you have a grasp on why that might be?”
Unfortunately, as we have seen more than once during this inquiry, the question was posed to someone who is not qualified to answer. It is only necessary to look at the motivation of those presenting their story to understand why significant differences occur in the narrative. Both Wild Fish and the Coastal Communities Network have clearly state that they want salmon farming removed from Scottish waters and thus they try to present the industry in the worst possible light. Hopefully, the committee members will see past this blinkered narrative and recognise how important the sector is to Scotland.
And yet, when a Scottish Government official who helps regulate the salmon farming sector is allowed to speak, the MSPs on the committee who have no doubt been bombarded with many letters highlighting how bad the salmon farming sector really is, are suddenly surprised to hear a totally different narrative.
It was very clear early on in this second week of the salmon inquiry to see that there was a major deficiency in the way it had been organised. Some of the MSPs struggled to understand the way that fish health is managed. It would have made much more sense had the committee visited a couple of farms before they took evidence. They should have seen for themselves how farms operate and how they deal with emerging challenges. The committee members could have then posed questions based on what they had seen, rather than on what others claim.
Looking at the list of sessions and witnesses, it seems that whilst the committee members have asked a lot of questions about sea lice, no sea lice expert is to be called. Instead, one of the sessions will be given over the views of river proprietors. How this will help committee members form a valid opinion on salmon farms is unclear unless they don’t want Scotland to have a thriving salmon farming sector.
I am not going to dwell on week 2 except to say that reference has been made during the inquiry as to the horrific images filmed in salmon pens. By coincidence, anti-salmon farm activist Don Staniford posted one such image on his Twitter feed at the same time as the inquiry was underway. It is an image of one fish affected by sea lice, which is clearly not in a good state.
Mr Staniford often says that he takes these images because a camera never lies. However, whilst the image is of one fish, he implies that such fish are typical of all the fish on a farm. Mr Allan tells a very different story
Emma Roddick asked him ‘You said a few times that management of sea lice has improved in Scotland. Have the numbers of sea lice in Scotland gone down significantly?’
He replied ‘Yes and I think that is borne out by the data that has been submitted and practically on site, we see almost no epizootics of sea lice which cause significant physical damage to the stocks – the detrimental effects of sea lice are very, very visible when you get to significant parasite levels you will see skin grazed off particularly off the head, along the back at that point you have a clinical effect of sea lice. You must bear in mind that sea lice and salmon have evolved together over eons but where they get out of control you see very significant damage, almost never do we see the effect of that clinical infection’.
The question is who should we believe? An activist creeping around at dawn who takes a couple of pictures before the fish are disturbed or the long-time group leader of the Scottish Government’s Fish Health Inspectorate who says that a clinical outbreak of sea lice infestation is extremely rare.
In addition, I would argue that there is such a lack of understanding of sea lice ecology that it is inevitable that there is so much misinformation about sea lice in circulation. Unfortunately, I don’t have any confidence that the committee will be able to uncover the truth. Until those opposing salmon farming are prepared to sit down with the industry and have a proper discussion, nothing is ever likely to change. For example, Wild Fish are happy to give evidence to the inquiry but have spent the last ten years avoiding speaking to me. If they are so convinced of their case, they should have no problem countering the views of a lone scientist.
East coast infestation: Finding relevant information on the Marine Directorate website is a full-time job. Gone are the days when it was possible to call someone and ask. Now a Freedom of Information request is required for any data, leading to waits of a minimum of 20 working days.
I was lucky in accidentally coming across some relevant data this week. I was already aware that the Marine Directorate scientists operate the Scottish Coastal Observatory in Loch Ewe on Scotland’s west coast. I had previously mined the data to find that over a period of 16 years and 201,164 samples only 820 were of the family Caligidae, of which the salmon louse is just one. The Observatory cannot identify specific species so records of the family are used. Interestingly, the observatory site in Loch Ewe is located just a few hundred metres from the salmon farm and therefore large numbers of Caligidae should be predicted.
This week, I found the data from the only other Coastal Observatory site that records zooplankton – in the North Sea at Stonehaven south of Aberdeen. This site has operated slightly longer than the one in Loch Ewe at twenty-three years and therefore has collected more records totaling 225,921 of which 1,056 were of the family Caligidae. This means that Caligidae made up 0.46% of the zooplankton on the east coast and 0.40% on the west coast, despite the close proximity to a salmon farm on the west.
What is interesting is that whilst the Scottish Government’s SPILLS project spent a summer looking for sea lice larvae around the Isle of Shuna, they largely failed to find any. SEPA are now proposing to validate their models using sentinel cages which do not provide any measure of larval sea lice in the water column. Instead, I do not see any reason why SEPA could not use the same technology used by the Scottish Coastal Observatory placed in key areas of predicted high sea lice counts. Surely, if the technology is good enough for the Marine Directorate to monitor zooplankton, then it should be equally up to the job to the monitor the sea lice larvae needed to validate their model. Without such validation, the model is totally worthless in the real world. I would be happy to explain to SEPA why this is but like the Marine Directorate, they are unwilling to discuss the science. However, I cannot imagine that those impacted by the regulation will be willing to accept regulation that has not been properly validated. The latest news from Norway has the Minister now admitting their regulation in the form of the Traffic Light System is failing to do its job, This is not surprising given that the science does not support the aims of Traffic Light regulation.
The data from the Scottish Coastal Observatory is yet more evidence that the idea that the west coast waters are a soup of infectious sea lice larvae is just nonsense. I will be interested to hear how the Marine Directorate can relate their own data to their narrative of sea lice infestation. However, I won’t be holding my breath because the Marine Directorate don’t want to engage with those who question the Marine Directorate’s own science.
Unsettled: The comments I make in reLAKSation are usually prompted by news in the wider media however, I feel so strongly about a written response I received from Scotland’s Marine Directorate that I believe it merits further discussion. Unfortunately, the Marine Directorate have said they have nothing more to say on the matter.
The letter said:
“In its Summary of Sea Lice Science, the Marine Directorate (MD) lists a substantial number of reputable peer-reviewed scientific papers which together point to a risk on wild salmonids due to sea lice emanating from open pen aquaculture. As would be expected there has been scientific debate regarding impacts within the literature and this now appears to be settled.”
It’s my view that if someone must tell you that a scientific paper is reputable then there is clearly a concern that it is not. Equally, when someone has to tell you that the paper has been peer-reviewed then there are doubts about its validity. I have written extensively about the conclusions drawn by the papers cited by the Marine Directorate in the sea lice science review. So far, the Marine Directorate has not answered even one of the concerns I have raised. Certainly, it is my opinion, whoever wrote this document does not have the confidence to stand up and defend it. It’s now at least ten years since I first contacted the then Marine Scotland Science asking to discuss such observations and I have never had that discussion. I would have thought that if they were confident in their science, then they would be willing to spend an hour or two just to allay my concerns (shut me up). I have even offered to present my observations to all the Marine Directorate’s scientists but that offer has been refused.
The sea lice science document states “Ford & Myers (2008) compares indices of salmon abundance on the east and west coasts of Scotland together with farm production data. They found a relative reduction on the catches and counts of salmon on the west coast correlating with increased production of farmed salmon.”
I have asked this question many times previously but can anyone shed any light on how these graphs support the view that there is a relative reduction in catches and counts due to salmon farming. Surely, someone somewhere must be able to explain this to me. Certainly, the Marine Directorate is not willing to do so.
The graph of catches appears to show a similar decline from both coasts, and this is confirmed by graphs produced elsewhere in 2011 and again by me this year.
I would also mention a second paper by Vøllestad and others including scientists from the Marine Directorate. The sea lice science document states: “Analysis of historic rod catch records from Scotland systematically allocated Scottish rivers into three areas: draining into the North Sea, Irish Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Catches of wild salmon after the 1980s decline on the Scottish Atlantic coast relative to elsewhere (Vøllestad et all 2009). This area covers the majority of mainland Scotland’s salmon farms although the authors stressed that this did not prove a causative link with aquaculture.
My analysis shows that there is a lot wrong with this paper which I have written about extensively in the past. However, that statement that the observations did not prove a causative link with aquaculture shows how desperate Marine Directorate scientists are to implicate salmon farming using ‘reputable’ papers that clearly state that a causative link with salmon farming has not been established.
We are now in June 2024. Scientists giving evidence to the Rural Affairs Committee have acknowledged that aquaculture science has moved on, yet the Marine Directorate continue to rely on papers from 15 years ago to argue their case and from this they deduce the science has been settled. The science is far from settled; it is just that the Marine Directorate just won’t admit it. I can only presume that their scientists aren’t willing to accept that the narrative they promote is still firmly stuck in the 1980s when anglers first blamed salmon farming for the declines in wild stocks.