By Alexandra Morton - Day 4 it just gets more interesting

Day 4 it just gets more interesting

Dr. Miller was on the stand again at the Cohen hearing on diseases that might be killing the Fraser sockeye. Today we learned that a single salmon farm with 1,000,000 fish can shed 60 billion viral particles per hour during a disease outbreak. Work done by Kyle Garver (DFO virologist) modeled what this might look like in the Discovery Islands. This is highly relevant because the Discovery Islands are the narrowest portion of the Fraser sockeye’s marine migration route.

In this figure, black is water and you can see two white circles which represent salmon farms. The grey patchy areas are the “viral particles” leaving the farms and they completely fill parts of the channels. This means as sockeye travel through this area there would be no opportunity to avoid viral particles during a salmon farm disease outbreak. Salmon breathe by passing water over their gills, so the oxygen in the water comes into contact with their bloodstream. This means as a wild salmon passes through a salmon farmed region, salmon farm-origin pathogens leaving the farm fish’s bodies comes into contact with the bloodstream of the wild salmon.

Read the rest of this very interesting blog post 

here at Alexandra Morton´s website