Save Wild Salmon, Save Orcas

Morton noses her workboat away from her dock here, she is on a crusade, seeking not orcas, but evidence against the salmon farms she believes drove most of the killer whales away, in part by infecting the wild salmon the whales eat with parasites called sea lice. Her work is a challenge to the salmon farm industry and to the Canadian and British Columbia officials who regulate it.

Once dismissed as an outsider and amateur, Morton has gradually gained the respect of fisheries experts like Ray Hilborn, a University of Washington researcher. "She doesn’t come from a science background but she has had a lot of influence in highlighting the issue," he said. Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia, calls her "a spunky hero."

That may be because she takes the issue personally. The disappearance of the orcas in the Broughton "ruined my life, absolutely," Morton said one day recently as she headed off to net baby salmon and check them for sea lice. "A lot of people have lost stuff they set out to do but, yeah, it ruined my whole plan."

According to the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association, farms produce $450 million worth of Atlantic salmon a year in British Columbia. At any given time, 70 to 80 farm sites operate in provincial waters, perhaps 15 or so in the Broughton, a hardly inhabited area across Queen Charlotte Strait from the north end of Vancouver Island. Typically, each installation has a collection of net pens, usually crossed by metal walkways, floating in a cove or bay. Individual sites typically contain 500,000 to 750,000 penned fish.

As tiny young wild salmon, smolts, pass by these pens on their way to sea, they can pick up so many lice they die, Morton and other researchers have reported.

Farm operators like Marine Harvest, a Norwegian concern that is a major presence in salmon farming here, concede that penned fish are vulnerable to microbes and parasites but say drugs and pesticides minimize the problem, virtually eliminating the risk to wild fish stocks.