We live in an era — the Anthropocene — where humans and societies are reshaping and changing ecosystems. Pollution, human-made climate change and overfishing have all altered marine life and ocean food webs.

Increasing ocean temperatures are amplifying the accumulation of neurotoxic contaminants such as organic mercury (methylmercury) in some marine life. This especially affects top predators including marine mammals such as fish-eating killer whales that strongly rely on large fish as seafood for energy.

Now the combination of mercury pollution, climate change and overfishing are conspiring together to further contaminate marine life and food webs. This has obvious implications for ecosystems and the ocean, but also for public health. The risk of consuming mercury-contaminated fish and seafood is growing with climate change.

Mercury rising

Regulations have lowered global mercury emissions from human-made sources, such as coal-fired power plants, between 1990 and 2010, but mercury is still present in the marine environment.

Methylmercury builds up in the muscle tissue of fish across the food web, “bioaccumulating” in larger and high trophic level predators. This is why larger pelagic fish (for example, tuna, marlins, billfishes and sharks) — those that eat a lot of fish — are in general considered riskier to eat than smaller ones.

Seared tuna. Photo: Taylor Grote / Unsplash

In humans, mercury can lead to neurological disorders. Children who are exposed to mercury during fetal development and childhood have a greater risk of poor performance on tests that measure attention, IQ, fine motor function and language.

Climate change can amplify the accumulation of methylmercury in fish and marine mammals at the top of their food webs due to changes in the entry and fate of mercury in the ocean and the composition and structure of these marine food webs. A warmer and more acidic ocean may increase the amount of methylmercury that enters the food web.

Overfishing can also exacerbate the mercury levels in some fish species. Pacific salmon, squid and forage fish, as well as Atlantic bluefin tuna and Atlantic cod and other fish species are susceptible to increases in methylmercury due to rising ocean temperatures.

Our modelling research work shows that Chinook salmon, the largest Pacific salmon species and main prey of endangered southern resident killer whales, is projected to be exposed to high methylmercury accumulation due to changes in its prey that are driven by climate change.

Under a worst-case climate-change scenario, where greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase and global temperatures reach between 2.6C and 4.8C by 2100, Chinook salmon will see a 10 per cent increase in methylmercury. But under a best-case scenario, where emissions are low and global temperature rise is in the order of 0.3C to 1.7C at the end of the century, mercury levels would increase by only one per cent.

For forage fish, such as Pacific sardine, anchovy and Pacific herring, which are key ecological and commercial species in the Pacific Rim ecosystem, the methylmercury increase is projected to be 14 per cent under the influence of high emissions and three per cent under low emissions. Here again, this increase is driven by dietary shifts and changes in the food web composition due to warmer oceans.

A school of sardines. Photo: Klaus Stiefel / Flickr

Fishing down the food web

Atlantic cod stocks were over-exploited along the northeastern coast of Canada during the last century. Chinook salmon stocks from the northeastern Pacific Ocean are also dwindling because of natural factors and environmental stressors, including predation, habitat loss, warming oceans and fishing. The combination of these pressures can make Pacific salmon more susceptible to methylmercury bioaccumulation.

When one species is overfished, fishing fleets expand and adjust their targets, often fishing down the marine food webs. The cascading effects lead to changes in prey and foodweb composition for the remaining species, likely altering the transfer of organic contaminants such as persistent organic pollutants and methylmercury in top predators.

Aquacalypse now: the end of fish

When fish are removed from the food web, larger fish and top predators may be forced to consume more or different prey, or smaller fish than they usually do. These fish can be highly contaminated with mercury.

The combination of climate change and overfishing are further shifting the composition of fish in the ocean and where they are found. They are also altering the way these species are exposed to pollutants, increasing levels of methylmercury in Atlantic cod and Atlantic blue fin tuna — fish that are often eaten by humans.

Protecting health and the planet

Based on this evidence, the public health community should revisit and revise fish consumption guidelines for those who are most likely to be exposed to mercury (coastal communities) or experience negative effects (pregnant women, infants and children).

Our simulations show that the projected methylmercury concentrations in forage fish and Chinook salmon will surpass Canada’s mercury consumption limits this century, as well as the consumption advisory level issued by the World Health Organization.

In our human-dominated world, it is imperative that we consume fish and shellfish that come from sustainable fisheries and make efforts to reduce ocean pollution. International and national environmental policies, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goal to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, marine resources and fisheries (SDG 14) and the Paris Climate Agreement, can conserve marine species and protect our blue planet for generations to come.

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High concentrations of a potentially toxic element have been found in fish in the Kootenai River of Montana and American scientists are pointing the finger at Canadian coal mines for the contamination. 

In late September, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a report documenting elevated concentrations of selenium in fish just south of the U.S.-Canada border. 

The study found some fish contained selenium concentrations surpassing the U.S. recommended maximum levels. Researchers found similar concentrations of selenium in the eggs of mountain whitefish.

“Selenium loads have been increasing over time in the Elk River, British Columbia, Canada, due to coal mining operations and runoff from associate spoil piles,” the report reads.

The Elk River is a tributary to the Kootenai River in Montana as well as Lake Koocanusa, where the ongoing research is being conducted. Coal mines in the Elk Valley, near Fernie, B.C., have been singled out as the main source of the contaminant.

Teck’s five metallurgical coal mines are all upstream of the transboundary Koocanusa Reservoir. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

While selenium is an essential element for survival, overexposure can have devastating effects. In fish, it can lead to facial and spinal deformities, or an absence of the plates that overlay and protect the fish’s gills. In humans, it can lead to hair loss, muscle weakness and decreased brain function, among other issues, according to Health Canada. 

Canadian scientist finds some invertebrates wiped out by selenium

Meanwhile in Canada, a growing awareness of selenium as a byproduct of mining, paired with numerous unknowns about its impacts in different aquatic environments, led toxicology researcher Stephanie Graves to take a closer look at its impacts. 

Graves, a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan, spent the last two years dumping various doses of selenium into lake enclosures in Ontario to monitor the effects, both at and above the recommended government thresholds.

Stephanie Graves collects samples from her research enclosures. Photo: Emilie Ferguson / Experimental Lakes Area

Graves monitored the effects of selenium on a number of species, from fish to invertebrates, such as this copepod. Photo: Stephanie Graves / Experimental Lakes Area

Her research was done in two lakes reserved for such research at northwestern Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area — a collection of 58 lakes cut off from nearly all human influence, used by researchers to conduct studies free of other contaminants and influencing factors.

Graves wanted to address two things in her research: how much selenium accumulated in invertebrates like zooplankton and other aquatic insects, as well as larger species such as fathead minnows. She also wanted to know what elevated concentrations did to these species. 

Tiny invertebrates often don’t receive a lot of attention, but they are an integral piece of the aquatic food web.

“What we found so far is that those organisms can be very sensitive to selenium,” Graves said. 

In fact, she found that some of the invertebrates were wiped out, or nearly wiped out at higher concentrations of selenium. Mayflies are often used to demonstrate impacts of pollution, Graves explains, because they are so sensitive — and this was no exception. 

“They’re an important food source. So losing [mayflies] could have implications for higher trophic level organisms like fish. And invertebrates in general have very important roles in the ecosystem, in nutrient cycling and the transfer of nutrients to higher trophic levels,” Graves said. 

The loss of even some of those organisms is significant, she added. 

Grave’s research also found significant losses in a kind of zooplankton — another principal food source for fish.

And if you doubted just how important these seemingly small shifts are, Graves only exposed fish to the selenium-dosed environments for six weeks, and that time was enough to notice decreased growth of the fish. 

Even the highest concentrations Graves used in her experiments can be found downstream of mines in Canada, she said. However, her research was very purposefully conducted in a lake, to consider what she calls the “worst case scenario” where those high-concentration flows aren’t diluted before arriving at a low-flow body of water. 

“These concentrations aren’t unrealistic,” Graves said. 

In one of her papers, published in the journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Graves suggests that recommended federal guidelines for selenium, which is 1 microgram per litre, may not be sufficient to protect all ecosystems — specifically lakes. 

In the end, Graves’ research doesn’t bode well for the health of places such as Montana’s Lake Koocanusa.

A group of scientists and conservationists paddle out on to the Koocanusa Reservoir where they are conducting independent water testing. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

More regulations to come

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy said that the provincial government is continuously working with partners in Montana to further selenium research. 

“The Province of British Columbia is committed to improving water quality in Lake Koocanusa and its tributary river systems,” the statement read.

The B.C. government said that the consortium is working toward setting a new target for the water system that will be followed by both B.C. and Montana regulators starting in 2020.

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Over the past year, Michael Rennie has dumped 30,000 tiny freshwater shrimp into a remote lake in northern Ontario.

Rennie, a freshwater ecologist at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, is trying to find out if these shrimp can help the lake’s ecosystem recover from an environmental catastrophe that many people probably thought had already been solved: acid rain.

Anyone who was alive during the 1970s and ’80s in North America will remember acid rain as the big environmental issue of the time. Dead lakes, corroded statues and spiking rates of asthma made for compelling stories on the evening news. But as measures to deal with the pollution came into effect, the issue slipped from public consciousness, even though the story was far from over.

“Many people probably feel that we’ve solved acid rain, because there is a lack of awareness that the recovery will take a long time,” says Karen Kidd, an ecotoxicologist at McMaster University.

Scientists are experimenting with adding mysis shrimp back to a lake in northern Ontario, which has been used in experiments about the effects of acid rain. Photo: IISD Experimental Lakes Area

What exactly is acid rain? 

Acid rain forms when nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide gases are released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. Those gases react with water molecules in the atmosphere to produce nitric and sulphuric acids, which then fall across the landscape as rain, snow and fog. The rain acidifies lakes and soils and corrodes buildings, while the nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide particles contribute to heart and lung problems. More acidic systems also tend to make mercury more available, and promote its uptake into the food web.

Aside from the lakes, acid rain also damaged the ground around them, leaching minerals like calcium and magnesium out of the soil, reducing the land’s ability to buffer the system. This was especially damaging in Atlantic Canada, where Kidd does most of her research, because the region’s many bogs meant the soils and waters were already naturally more acidic, so they started with even less neutralizing capacity.

“The chemical recovery happens fairly quickly, but the biological recovery lags behind.”

At the time, it seemed like an intractable problem. The vested industrial and economic interests involved were too strong, and the damage too severe to reverse.

“It seemed like a hopeless issue,” says John Gunn, a fisheries biologist at Laurentian University in Sudbury who has been studying the effects of acid rain for more than 30 years. “There were hundreds of damaged lakes, the complete collapse of the sport fishery.”

But a combination of scientific evidence and public pressure succeeded in forcing industry to clean up its act. The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment in the United States and the 1991 Canada-U.S. Air Quality Agreement set strict limits on emissions and set up a cap-and-trade program to encourage companies to adopt cleaner technologies. The amount of acid rain falling in the U.S. and Canada dropped dramatically.

“It’s been a big success story,” says Gene Likens, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut who first discovered the effects of acid rain in 1963 at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. “At Hubbard Brook the acidity is now 80 per cent less than it was in the 1960s.”

Without new inputs of acid, many lakes and streams were able to return to their previous, more neutral, composition. But other parts of the ecosystem do not bounce back so easily.

“The chemical recovery happens fairly quickly, but the biological recovery lags behind,” says Rennie. So he is looking for ways to give it a boost.

Restoring the food chain

In the 1970s scientists acidified lake 223, at the Experimental Lakes Area in northern Ontario near Kenora, in an experiment to study the effects of acid rain on ecosystems. They found that while larger fish like lake trout weren’t directly affected by the lower pH, many of the things they eat, such as crayfish, fathead minnows and mysis shrimp, were wiped out, so the trout starved. Pictures of those starving trout were part of what helped to convince politicians to act on acid rain.

A healthy trout. Photo: IISD Experimental Lakes Area

A starving lake trout from acidified lake 223 at the Experimental Lakes Area. Photo: IISD Experimental Lakes Area

When the lake was restored to its natural pH level after the experiment, most of those prey species recovered. But not the mysis. Today, more than 30 years later, the trout in lake 223 are smaller, grow more slowly and have higher levels of mercury than those in neighbouring lakes, all because they don’t have the shrimp to eat.

“What if we put them back? Would it help the trout?” asks Rennie.

Rennie and his team are trying to answer that question. Each spring and fall for three years they will add 10,000 shrimp to the lake. Then, after waiting a couple of years to see if the shrimp can re-establish a breeding population, they will check to see if the trout are getting healthier. If so, restocking missing species could be a technique to help speed the recovery of other lakes affected by acid rain.

Because the lake is part of the long-term research at the Experimental Lakes Area, Rennie knows exactly what the ecosystem looked like before the lake was acidified, so he has a target to shoot for in restoring it.

“This is one of the rare instances where we know what used to be there, so it is okay to put it back,” he says.

Lake 223 at the Experimental Lakes Area in northern Ontario. The lake has been used to study the effects of acid rain. Photo: IISD Experimental Lakes Area

Not every lake’s history is as well documented as that of lake 223, though. So Rennie is also testing a method of reconstructing the past conditions for lakes without that documented history. He is looking at environmental DNA – the genetic traces left behind by long-dead organisms – in sediment cores from the bottom of the lake. If those match up with lake 223’s historical record, the same technique could be used to see into the past of other lakes, and figure out what creatures are missing today.

“We could use sediments to see what the lakes looked like before, and use that as our restoration target,” he says.

Fears of a backslide from increased emissions

It might prove impossible to return the damaged ecosystems to their historical state, of course. The loss of neutralizing minerals from the soil has left many in an extremely fragile state, Likens says, comparing it to someone with heartburn who has lost all of their Tums and Rolaids. Even a small amount of backsliding could undo 30 years of recovery.

“If we were to increase emissions again in these poorly buffered systems, the effects could be very large,” he says.

“When we were faced with what everybody described as irreversible damage, that proved not to be true.”

And in the decades since the lakes were ravaged by acid rain they have also been hit by another environmental disaster, climate change, which may mean it is not possible to get the ecosystem back to the way it was before.

“The climate may have changed enough already that it is no longer suitable for the organisms we want to bring back,” says Rennie.

The success of the efforts to control acid rain leave many scientists optimistic for the fight against climate change. The root cause of the problem — the burning of fossil fuels — is the same, and so are many of the solutions.

“We came together to make effective regulations and forced industry to adopt cleaner technologies, which made them more profitable,” says Gunn.

And the recovery shows that the earth has the resilience to bounce back from an insult, even if it might take decades, he adds.

“When we were faced with what everybody described as irreversible damage, that proved not to be true.”

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This is an excerpt adapted with permission of the publisher from the book Vanishing Fish by Daniel Pauly, published May 28, 2019 by Greystone Books.

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff–like callousness by the world’s fisheries. Beginning in the 1950s, as their operations became increasingly industrialized, with onboard refrigeration, acoustic fish-finders, and, later geographic positioning systems, or GPS, the fishing fleets first depleted populations of cod, hake, flounder, sole,and halibut in the Northern Hemisphere. As the abundance of those fish declined, the fleets moved southward, to the coasts of developing countries, and, ultimately, all the way to the shores of Antarctica, searching for icefishes and rock cods, and finally for the small, shrimp-like krill.

As the bounty of coastal waters dropped, fisheries moved farther offshore, to deeper waters. And, finally, as the larger fish began to disappear, boats began to catch smaller, uglier fish that had never before been considered fit for human consumption. Many were renamed so that they could be more easily marketed. The suspicious slimehead became the delicious orange roughy, while the worrisome Patagonian toothfish became the wholesome Chilean seabass. Others, like the homely hoki, were cut up so that they could be sold sight unseen as fish sticks and filets in fast-food restaurants and the frozen-food aisle.

The scheme was carried out by nothing less than a fishing-industrial complex — an alliance of corporate fishing fleets, lobbyists, parliamentary representatives and fisheries economists. By hiding behind the romantic image of the small-scale, independent fisher, they secured political influence and government subsidies far in excess of what would be expected, given their minuscule contribution to the GDP of advanced economies — in the United States, even less than that of the hair salon industry. In Japan today, huge, vertically integrated conglomerates, such as Taiyo or the better-known Mitsubishi, lobby their friends in the Japanese Fisheries Agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them gain access to the few remaining plentiful tuna populations, such as those in the waters surrounding South Pacific countries. Beginning in the early 1980s, the United States, which had not traditionally been much of a fishing country, began heavily subsidizing U.S. fleets, producing its own fishing-industrial complex, dominated by large processors and retail chains.

Daniel Pauly, author of Vanishing Fish. Photo: The Sea Around Us

Today, the world’s governments provide over US$30 billion in subsidies each year — about one-third of the value of the global catch — that keep fisheries going, even when they have overexploited their resource base. As a result, there are between two and four times as many boats as the annual catch requires; yet the funds to “build capacity” keep coming.

The jig, however, is nearly up. In 1950, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated that, globally, we were catching about 17 million metric tonnes annually of fish (cod, mackerel, tuna, etc.) and invertebrates (lobster, squid, clams, etc.). Reported marine catches peaked at about 90 million metric tonnes per year in the mid-1990s, and they have been declining since. Much like Madoff’s infamous operation, which required a constant influx of new investments to generate “revenue” for past investors, the global fishing-industrial complex has required a constant influx of new “stocks” to continue operating. Instead of restricting its catches so that fish can reproduce and maintain their populations, the industry has simply fished until fish populations were depleted and then moved on to new or deeper waters and to smaller and stranger fish. And, just as a Ponzi scheme will collapse once the pool of potential investors has been drained, so too will the fishing industry collapse as the oceans are drained of life.

Our impacts on the ocean 

Unfortunately, it is not just the future of the fishing industry that is at stake but also the continued health of the world’s largest ecosystem. While the climate crisis regularly gathers front-page attention, people — even those who profess great environmental consciousness — continue to eat fish as if fishing were a sustainable practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee. In the past 50 years, we have reduced the populations of large commercial fish, such as bluefin tuna, Atlantic cod and other favourites, by a staggering 90 per cent. One study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that by 2048 all commercial fish populations will have “collapsed,” meaning that they will be generating 10 per cent or less of their peak catches. Whether or not the particular year, or even decade, of the peak catch is correct, one thing is clear: fish are in dire peril, and, if they are, then so are we.

Eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee.

The extent of the fisheries’ Ponzi scheme eluded government scientists for many years. They had long studied the health of fish populations, of course, but typically laboratories would focus only on the species in their country’s waters. Moreover, those studying a particular species in one country would communicate only with those studying that same species in another. Thus, they failed to notice an important pattern: popular species were sequentially replacing each other in the catches that fisheries were reporting, and, when a species faded, scientific attention shifted to the replacement species. At any given moment, scientists might acknowledge that one-half or two-thirds of fisheries were being overfished, but when the abundance of a particular fish had strongly declined, it was simply removed from the denominator of the fraction. For example, the Hudson River sturgeon was not counted as overfished once it disappeared from New York waters; it simply became an anecdote in the historical record. The baselines just kept shifting, allowing us to continue blithely damaging marine ecosystems.

This past March a 14-foot fish was spotted in New York’s Hudson River, giving hope of revival for the embattled Atlantic sturgeon. Photo: Ricky Romero / Flickr

It was not until the 1990s that a series of high-profile scientific papers demonstrated that we needed to study, and mitigate, fish depletions at the global level. These studies showed that phenomena previously observed at local levels — for example, the disappearance of large species from fisheries’ catches and their replacement by smaller species — were also occurring globally. It was a realization akin to understanding that financial meltdowns are due not to the failure of a single bank but rather to the failure of the entire banking system. And it drew a lot of controversy.

Two types of scientific responses 

The notion that fish are globally imperilled has been challenged in many ways — perhaps most notably by fisheries biologists, who have questioned the facts, the tone and even the integrity of those making such allegations. Marine ecologists are concerned mainly with threats to the diversity of the ecosystems they study, and so, they frequently work in concert with environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and are often funded by philanthropic foundations. In contrast, fisheries biologists traditionally work for government agencies, like the National Marine Fisheries Service within the U.S. Department of Commerce, or as consultants to the fishing industry, and their chief goal is to protect fisheries and the fishers they employ. I was trained as a fisheries biologist in Germany, and, while they would dispute this, the agencies for which many of my former classmates work clearly have been captured by the industry they are supposed to regulate. Thus, there are fisheries scientists who, for example, write that cod have “recovered” or even “doubled” their numbers when, in fact, they have increased merely from one per cent to two per cent of their original abundance in the 1950s or earlier.

The difficulty lies in forcing the fishing-industrial complex to catch fewer fish so that populations can rebuild.

Yet despite their different interests and priorities — and despite their disagreements about the “end of fish” — marine ecologists and fisheries scientists both want there to be more fish in the oceans. This is partly because both are scientists, who are expected to concede when confronted with strong evidence. And, as with global warming, the evidence is overwhelming: fish populations are declining in most parts of the world. Ultimately, the important rift is not between these two groups of scientists but between the public, which owns the sea’s resources, and the fishing-industrial complex, which needs fresh capital for its Ponzi scheme. The difficulty lies in forcing the fishing-industrial complex to catch fewer fish so that populations can rebuild.

It is essential that we do so as quickly as possible because the consequences of an end to fish are frightening. To some Western countries, an end to fish might simply seem like a culinary catastrophe, but for half a billion people in developing countries, particularly in Africa and South and Southeast Asia, fish are the main source of animal protein. What’s more, fisheries are a major source of livelihood for hundreds of millions of people. A World Bank report found that the income of the world’s 30 million small-scale fishers is shrinking. The decrease in catch has also dealt a blow to a prime source of foreign-exchange earnings, which impoverished countries — ranging from Senegal in West Africa to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific — rely on to support their imports of staples such as rice.

The oceans’ responses 

The end of fish would disrupt marine ecosystems to an extent that we are only now beginning to appreciate. Thus, the removal of small fish in the Mediterranean to fatten bluefin tuna in pens is causing the “common” dolphin to become exceedingly rare in some areas, and local extinction is probable. Other marine mammals and seabirds are similarly affected in various parts of the world. Moreover, the removal of top predators from marine ecosystems has cascading effects, leading to an increase in jellyfish and other gelatinous zooplankton and to the gradual erosion of the food web within which fish populations are embedded. This is what happened at the turn of this century off the coast of southwestern Africa, where an upwelling ecosystem similar to that off California, previously dominated by fish such as hake and sardines, has been taken over by millions of tonnes of jellyfish. 

Herring during the 2018 spawning season in British Columbia. Photo: Pacific Wild

Jellyfish population outbursts are also becoming more frequent in the northern Gulf of Mexico, where the fertilizer-laden runoff from the Mississippi River fuels uncontrolled algal blooms. The dead algae then fall to a sea bottom from which shrimp trawling has raked all animals capable of feeding on them, and so they rot, causing huge “dead zones.” Similar phenomena — which only jellyfish seem to enjoy — are occurring throughout the world, from the Baltic Sea to the Chesapeake Bay, and from the Black Sea in southeastern Europe to the Bohai Sea in northeastern China. Our oceans, having nourished us since the beginning of the human species some 150,000 years ago, are now turning against us. That dynamic will only grow more antagonistic as the oceans become warmer and more acidic because of climate change. Fish are expected to suffer mightily from global warming, making it essential that we preserve as great a number of fish and fish species as possible so that those that are able to adapt are around to evolve and propagate the next generations of marine life. In fact, new evidence tentatively suggests that large quantities of fish biomass could actually help attenuate ocean acidification. In other words, fish could help save us from the worst consequences of our own folly — yet we are killing them off. The jellyfish-ridden waters we are seeing now may be only the first scene in a watery horror show.

The roles of governments 

To halt this slide toward a marine dystopia, government intervention is required. Regulatory agencies must impose quotas on the amount of fish caught in any given year, and the way they structure such quotas is very important. For example, simply permitting all fisheries to catch a given aggregate number of fish annually results in a wasteful build-up of fleets and vessels as fisheries race to grab as large a share of the quota as possible before their competitors do. Such a system may protect the fish, but it is economically disastrous: the entire annual quota is usually landed in a short period, leading to temporary oversupply, which, in turn, leads to low prices. The alternative is to limit the number of fishers, with those retaining “access privileges” being able to catch their assigned fraction of the overall quota whenever they want, without competing against other fishers. Such individual quotas lead to less overall fishing effort and, hence, larger profit in the fishery.

Unfortunately, most fisheries economists, fixated solely on corporate short-term profits, argue that for such a system to work, access privileges must be handed out for free, be held in perpetuity, and be transferable (i.e., sellable and buyable like any other commodity). They call this construct “fishing rights,” or “individual transferable quotas.” However, there is no reason why a government should not auction off quotas with access privileges. The highest bidder would secure the right to a certain percentage of the quota, and society as a whole would benefit from providing private access to a public resource. This would be similar to ranchers paying for the privilege to graze their cattle on federal lands. Grazing “rights,” on the other hand, would simply give ownership of public land to ranchers, which is something few would consider.

Frozen bluefin tuna being auctioned at Tsukiji Market in Tokyo. Photo: Matt Saunders / Flickr

Some Pollyannas believe that aquaculture, or fish farming, can ensure the health of wild fish populations without government action — a notion supposedly buttressed by statistics of the FAO showing such rapid growth in aquaculture that more than 40 per cent of all “seafood” consumed now comes from farms. The problem with this argument is that China reports over 60 per cent of the world’s aquaculture production, and the FAO, which has been burned by inflated Chinese statistics before, expresses doubt about its stated production and growth rates.

Outside of China — where most farmed fish, such as carp, are freshwater vegetarians — aquaculture produces predominately carnivorous marine fish, like salmon, which are fed not only vegetal ingredients but also fishmeal and fish oil, which are obtained by grinding up perfectly edible herring, mackerel and sardines caught by what is coyly called “reduction fisheries.” Carnivore farming, which requires three to four pounds of smaller fish to produce one pound of a larger one, thus robs Peter to pay Paul. Aquaculture in the West produces a luxury product in global terms. To expect aquaculture to ensure that fish remain available — or, at least, to expect carnivore farming to solve the problem posed by diminishing catches from fisheries — would be akin to expecting that Enzo Ferrari’s cars rather than an emphasis on public transport can solve the gridlock in Los Angeles.

Others believe that fish populations can be rebuilt through consumer awareness campaigns that encourage buyers to make prudent choices. One such approach is to label seafood from fisheries deemed sustainable. In Europe, for example, consumers can look for the logo of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a non-profit started by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, which has a large fish-trading division. At first, the MSC certified only small-scale fisheries, but lately, it has given its seal of approval to large, controversial companies. It has even begun to measure its success by the percentage of the world catch that it certifies. Encouraged by a Walton Foundation grant and Wal-Mart’s goal of selling only certified fish, the MSC is actually considering certifying reduction fisheries, with the consequence that Wal-Mart, for example, will be able to sell farmed salmon shining with the ersatz glow of sustainability. (Given the devastating pollution, diseases and parasite infestations that have plagued salmon farms in Chile, Canada and other countries, this “Wal-Mart strategy” will, in the long term, make the MSC complicit in a giant scam.) The other market-based initiative, prevalent in the United States, distributes wallet-sized cards designed to steer consumers toward fish that the group issuing the cards deems to have been caught sustainably. Their success is considerable if measured by the millions of cards given away, for example, by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but assessing the impact on the fisheries is difficult. For one thing, the multitude of such cards leads to contradictions and confusion, as the same fish are assessed differently by different organizations. For example, ahi tuna (yellowfin) was once rated as “safe,” “questionable,” and “avoid” on the wallet cards issued by three different U.S. NGOs.

Herring fishing boats on the Georgia Strait, B.C. Photo: Pacific Wild

A bigger issue, however, is that these cards generate only “horizontal” pressure — that is, a group of restaurant-goers might chide each other for ordering the cod filet or might ask the overworked student who served them where the fish came from, but this pressure does not reach wholesalers, fleet operators or supermarket chains. “Vertical” pressure exerted by environmental NGOs on such decision-makers is far more effective. But, if that is true, why not directly pressure the government and legislators, since they are the ones who regulate the fisheries? 

The fact is that governments are the only entities that can prevent the end of fish. For one thing, once freed from their allegiance to the fishing-industrial complex, they are the ones with the research infrastructure capable of prudently managing fisheries. For another, it is they who provide the billions of dollars in annual subsidies that allow the fisheries to persist despite the lousy economics of the industry. Reducing these subsidies would allow fish populations to rebuild, and nearly scientists agree that the billions of dollars in harmful, capacity-enhancing subsidies must be phased out. Finally, only governments can zone the marine environment, identifying certain areas where fishing will be tolerated and others where it will not. In fact, all maritime countries will have to regulate their exclusive economic zones (EEZs, the 200-nautical-mile boundary areas established by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea within which a country has the sole right to fish). The United States has the largest EEZ in the world, and it has taken important first steps in protecting its resources, notably by creating a huge marine reserve in the northwest Hawaiian Islands. Creating, or re-creating, un-fished areas within which fish populations can regenerate is the only opportunity we have to repair the damage done to them.

There is no need for an end to fish, or to fishing, for that matter. But there is an urgent need for governments to free themselves from the fishing-industrial complex and its Ponzi scheme and to stop subsidizing the fishing-industrial complex and awarding it fishing “rights” when it should in fact pay for the privilege to fish. If governments can do this, then we will have fish forever.

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John Casselman doesn’t need to consult 70-plus years of climate data to know the Great Lakes are undergoing some dramatic and troubling changes.

He just follows the fish.

Casselman, a biologist at Queen’s University, has been studying climate change in the Great Lakes Basin longer than almost anyone else in his field, tracking the connection between water temperature and fish populations.

Fish have long been biologists’ best indicators of the Great Lakes’ health, through decades of battles against pollution. Now, Casselman says, they’re telling us a concerning story about climate change, too.

“The fish are telling us that these changes are real. If we don’t pay attention to this, it’s at our peril,” Casselman, former scientist for Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, told The Narwhal.

The Great Lakes are 1.6 degrees Celsius warmer than they were in the 1940s, according to daily temperature readings from the City of Belleville’s pumping station that draws water from the Bay of Quinte.

For fish, that’s a significant change that affects all aspects of their physiology, from spawning rates to growth to feeding patterns. Casselman’s research shows rising temperatures have caused a two-and-a-half fold decrease in the population of cold water fish such as northern pike or trout, while fueling a population boom for warm water fish such as bass.

“We’re seeing significantly more warm water fish, and for cool water fish, like pike or walleye, it’s becoming precarious,” he said. “In many places, lake fish and trout in inland lakes have simply disappeared.”

Now there’s new evidence the pace of the warming may be quickening.

This summer, researchers in a laboratory on the edge of the Detroit River began seeing an alarming spike in the readings coming back from a network a buoys spread across the lakes.

The report, from the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Windsor, showed increases of 3 degrees Celsius above the long-term average for surface water temperatures in some parts of the Great Lakes. Increases like that, if sustained across the system, would be devastating to cold-water fish populations.

It’s caught the attention of climatologists who worry about the implications on the entire Great Lakes ecosystem — from impacts on fish stocks and toxic algae blooms to shrinking ice cover and more aggressive invasive species.

Light blue streaks in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, left and top right, are due to high winds drawing up sediment. The light green hues in Lake Erie, bottom right, and in a small bay of Lake Huron are due to aglae blooms which build on the waters surface when winds are calm. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

For those who earn a living on the Great Lakes, the warming trend is one of their most pressing issues.

“It’s quite concerning,” said Kevin Reid, a biologist with the Ontario Commercial Fisheries’ Association. “Although we expect the industry to be viable going forward, we just don’t know what that’s going to be like. There’s so much uncertainty because of all the change that’s occurring.”

In some areas of the Great Lakes, commercial fishers are already starting to change the way they harvest fish because of climate change. Along the western shore of Lake Erie, fishing crews have switched to setting their nets only in the early morning, because as the water warms through the day they’re reporting smaller and smaller catches.

“The quality of the fish is degraded, because the water is so warm,” Reid said.

In parts of Lake Michigan, cold water species such as ciscoes have all but vanished. Larger algae blooms, fueled by warmer water, are also becoming a more pressing issue.

Although the toxins from algae haven’t been shown to be harmful to fish, they cause problems for the gill nets fishers use. In the colder waters of Lake Superior, where there hasn’t been a history of algae blooms, scientists are reporting increasing outbreaks.

Biologists also worry what the warming Great Lakes mean for invasive species, from Asian Carp to zebra mussels, which along with overfishing and pollution have already threatened dozens of native fish species.

One of the biggest threats is sea lampreys, which entered Lake Ontario through shipping canals in the 19th century and almost caused the collapse of the lower Great Lakes fishery by the late 1950s.

A mature male parasitic sea lamprey found in the Great Lakes. Sea lampreys, which are native to the Atlantic Ocean parasitize other fish by sucking their blood and bodily fluids. Photo: A. Miehls / Great Lakes Fishery Commission

Sea lampreys (which are essentially 340 million-year-old demogorgons of the sea) do not usually kill their host fish in the Atlantic Ocean where species co-evolved. However, because sea lampreys were only recently introduced into the Great Lakes system, they often kill the species of fish they parasitize there. Photo: T. Lawrence / Great Lakes Fishery Commission

A sea lamprey was found on this salmon, caught at the Rogers City Salmon Derby. According to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, lampreys prey on a wide variety of Great Lakes fish including lake trout, brown trout, lake sturgeon, lake whitefish, ciscoes, burbot, walleye, catfish, and Pacific salmonids including Chinook and coho salmon and rainbow trout/steelhead. Photo: M. Gaden / Great Lakes Fishery Commission

In warmer water, the lampreys transform into destructive adults much more quickly, leading some to wonder if current lamprey control programs should be dramatically expanded.

“The Great Lakes are quite susceptible to invasive species. As the lakes become warmer and winter becomes warmer, those species could find the lakes even more hospitable and spread even more rapidly throughout the system,” said Marc Gaden, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Michigan who is also communications director of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

“Then there’s the distinct possibly that the Great Lakes could become more hospitable to invaders from places that we hadn’t considered. Those would be really lethal, because the lakes could have no defense. It would be a one-two punch for native species.”

The lakes’ natural defense against some invasive species — harsh, cold winters — is also weakening.

Ice coverage on the Great Lakes has declined an average of 71 per cent over the past 40 years, according to the American Meteorological Society.

That’s caused increased evaporation and more frequent and intense storms that batter shorelines and fish habitat.    

Combine all this with shifts in the lower-end of the food chain, with shrinking populations of forage-based fish such as alewife that feed larger species, and you’ve got an ecosystem under immense stress. Whether people realize or not, the changes happening in the Great Lakes will eventually reach their communities, Gaden said.

For fisheries worth millions to local economies, there’s a lot on the line.    

Biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hold a lake sturgeon caught in the Great Lakes. Sturgeon are listed as threatened in the Great Lakes and are estimated to be at just one per cent of historical levels. Photo: Justin Chiotti / USFWS

“Changes in the fish community do affect people. They affect recreational fishers, subsistence fishers and commercial fishers. Losses to any of those communities have severe economic consequences,” Gaden said. “There are concerns that these kind of wholesale changes in the environment would have repercussions that folks don’t always think about.”

Casselman, meanwhile, has been warning for years about the impact of climate change on the Great Lakes’ fish. He just hopes the broader public is finally ready to take that warning seriously.

“The fish are trying to tell us something,” he said. “They were the indicators that told us about pollution. They were the indicators that told us about acid rain. Fish can be the indicators that tell us climate change is real.”

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Gary Krause was mystified by an unusual fish he caught in his trawl net off B.C.’s Pacific north coast in October. It was a Pacific electric ray, named for a pair of organs behind its head that can knock a human adult down with a powerful shock.

Trawl fishery records show 88 of these rays in B.C. waters since 1996. Although an electric ray was first recorded off Vancouver Island’s west coast in 1928, nearly a quarter of the more recent sightings came from 2015 alone.

Fishermen like Krause, who worked an astounding 4,000 days at sea over the past 35 years, are often the first to observe the beginnings of fundamental ecosystem shifts. In 2008, he also identified the first ever brown booby, a tropical seabird, in Canada’s Pacific waters.

Why are creatures like electric rays, which prefer warmer southern California or Baja waters, turning up with greater frequency further north?

Unlike land temperatures, which constantly fluctuate, ocean temperatures are usually stable, with virtually no daily changes, little seasonal differentiation and only minor shifts over decades. Most marine animals prefer a narrow temperature range and move only in response to changes.

Short-term oceanographic events, such as El Niño and the Pacific “blob” — an enormous area of unusually warm water in the North Pacific — demonstrate that while oceans may be relatively stable, they aren’t immune to temperature shifts. These phenomena explain the appearance of unexpected species off B.C.’s coast over the past winter, including a Guadalupe fur seal, green sea turtle and Risso’s dolphins.

Higher water temperatures are also changing the relative concentrations of microscopic, occasionally toxic algae.

While these marine oddities don’t necessarily indicate a full-scale ecosystem shift, they may be signs of what to expect as the planet warms. Shorter-term phenomena correspond with longer-term oceanographic changes around the world. These changes promise to fundamentally alter the cast of characters in marine ecosystems before we’ve had the opportunity to adequately study them.

Climate change is pushing more species of fish closer — and faster — to the cooler North and South poles than similar climate-provoked wildlife movements on land. Fish are moving an average of 277 kilometres every decade and phytoplankton are speeding along at 470 kilometres. Land-based wildlife are inching along at an average of six kilometers a decade.

These shifts are bringing together species that have never had contact before, introducing new predators that could result in regional extinctions. In addition to moving, phytoplankton, which produce half the world's oxygen and support most ocean life, have been declining dramatically over the past century, an average of one per cent a year.

Sea levels are also rising quickly because of climate change. Over the past two decades, global levels have risen more than twice as fast as in the 20th century. As water warms up, it expands.

Thermal expansion in warmer ocean waters has been the greatest contributor to global sea level rise over the past century — although rapid melting of glaciers, polar ice caps, and Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets is also a factor.

Higher ocean temperatures also stress coral reefs, which then release algae, causing the corals to bleach and often die.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef just experienced its worst bleaching ever, with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority reporting that half the coral in the northern parts of the reef were dead, according to a Guardian article.

Along with environmental impacts, warming oceans will create economic insecurities for industries such as fisheries. One study predicted a nearly 50 per cent decline in B.C. First Nations’ catches for culturally and commercially important fish by 2050.

We can help marine life by reducing greenhouse gas emissions to keep global average temperature increases below the 1.5 C goal set out in the December Paris Agreement. Well-monitored fisheries, like those in British Columbia, will become essential data-collection points for understanding shifting marine environments.

Although it’s difficult to reverse temperature and other oceanographic changes that climate change has already set in motion, we may be able to lessen the impact through habitat protection, strong fisheries management and robust scientific monitoring.

The Pacific electric ray is just one of many marine canaries warning us of changing ecosystems. We’d be wise to listen to these signals.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation senior research scientist Scott Wallace.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image: Pennington Marine Science Center/Youtube.

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Vessel noise is already hindering endangered southern resident killer whales from communicating and finding fish and the noise bombardment will get worse if proposals for coal terminals and pipelines in B.C and Washington State are approved, said scientists and environmentalists at a conference looking at the health of the Salish Sea.

"Ships dominate the soundscape of Puget Sound," said Scott Veirs, Beam Reach Marine Sciences and Sustainability School program coordinator and professor, speaking at the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference.

Veirs and his students take underwater sound recordings off Lime Kiln Park on San Juan Island, an area where the killer whales are known to spend time, and then model the echo-location and communication consequences for the resident killer whales. The resident killer whale population has dropped this year to 80 animals in three pods, the lowest number in more than a decade.

Sounds of swooshes, rattles and bangs echoed through the room as Veirs demonstrated noises surrounding the whales every day and audience members covered their ears as he played the screeching and metallic grindings made by a ship with a damaged propeller.

"At least one ship is present about 40 per cent of the time and when that ship is going through it reduces the range that whales can communicate by 68 per cent," Veirs said.

That means the whales miss about 37 per cent of calls and, if traffic doubles – as it could with increases in oil tankers from twinning the Kinder Morgan pipeline from Alberta to Burnaby and with 21 per cent more carriers and barges from proposed coal terminal expansions in B.C. and Washington – it is estimated the whales will miss 44 per cent of the calls, he said.

Current noise levels mean whales are already finding almost 50 per cent less fish than they would otherwise and a doubling of traffic would increase that to 58 per cent, Veirs said.

The noise is having a significant impact as chinook salmon is already scarce, Veirs said.

Canadian and U.S. government studies have pinpointed lack of salmon – and particularly the whales' preferred diet of chinook – noise and pollution as the major threats faced by the resident killer whales.

Juvenile chinook salmon. Photo by Roger Tabor, USFWS.

Ship owners should be offered incentives to properly maintain their vessels and the noise could be mitigated by ships slowing down or rerouting through Rosario instead of Haro Strait, Veirs suggested.

"Every knot you slow down, you come down about one noise level," he said.

However, that would mean more time in the vicinity of the whales, which would increase the possibility of oil spills, he said.

Concerns about shipping noise changing the whales' behaviour was echoed by Marla Holt, research wildlife biologist with the U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Vessel noise affects acoustic signals that are important for foraging, Holt said.

"The behavioural changes in response to vessels is quite concerning as one of them is decreased foraging," she said.

NOAA used digital acoustic recording tags, temporarily attached to whales with suction cups, to estimate noise levels.

The minimum noise level recorded, with two stationary and one slow boat in the vicinity, was 88 decibels and the maximum, with a large ferry less than 300 metres away, was 141 decibels, Holt said. Sound charts equate 140 decibels with the sounds of a jet engine at 100 feet.

Last year, the behaviour of the whales was different than in previous years, said Jenny Atkinson, executive director of The Whale Museum in Friday Harbour, Washington.

The Whale Museum documented sightings in the Salish Sea and found that, especially during the summer, when the whales typically spend their time around Juan de Fuca Strait, Haro Strait and the Strait of Georgia, the animals spent more time off the west coast of Vancouver Island and did not get together to socialize in their traditional areas.

It is not known whether the behaviour changes are connected to salmon runs or noise, but the result is that no one is observing the greeting ceremonies or the three pods coming together in a superpod, Atkinson said.

"They're not spending too much time socializing and making babies," she said.

The only calf born in 2013 washed up dead and no births have yet been reported this year.

An additional problem is that southern residents reproduce more slowly than northern residents, possibly because of lack of prey availability or contamination, said Dawn Noren of NOAA.

But other whale populations are doing well, with increases in the northern resident and transient killer whale populations and a resurgence of humpback populations, Atkinson said.

"So what is going on with the southern residents?" she asked.

Howard Garrett of Orca Network has watched the changing behaviour and believes prey availability is the most likely cause.

"It may be that it's not just lack of food on the inside, but an abundance on the outside," he said.

The whales appear to like the protection of inland waters as it allows them to congregate, but that will likely start happening again once they are well fed, Garrett said.

Superpods are important for mating as there are strict rules within the pods that do not permit mating with family members, Garrett said.

"Maybe they're having superpods off the west coast, but the chance of that seems slighter because of the rougher water," he said.

Image Credit: vijay_SRV via Flickr

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More than a year after the program's supposed implementation, negotiations over the Alberta-Canada Joint Oil Sands Monitoring (JOSM) program were still ongoing between the federal government and the Government of Alberta, email correspondence shows.

In documents obtained by the Globe and Mail through the Access to Information Act, it’s clear that the conditions of the program changed throughout the last year. Though details are unclear due to redactions in the released emails, it’s evident that the final deal wasn’t signed until June of this year after significant back and forth and meetings between the Alberta government—who publicly resisted the creation of joint provincial-federal program—and Environment Canada officials.

Bob Hamilton, Environment Canada’s deputy minister, wrote on March 28 of this year, more than a full year after the program was announced, that they “have a green light to move forward with OS [oilsands] monitoring.”

The program was designed to increase monitoring of air, water and habitat quality from annual to monthly, with results available to the public to allow for independent scientific investigation. Full reports were to be issued annually.

After independently appointed panels at both the provincial and federal levels deemed Alberta’s monitoring systems inadequate, the Government of Alberta still balked at the prospect of the federal government implementing a new monitoring system.

The newly released emails indicate continued pushback from Alberta and an unwillingness to face the full extent of the gaps in existing environmental monitoring policy.

One email shows that Alberta’s Deputy Minister of Environment Dana Woodworth believed the province’s existing system left it “well-positioned” to implement a new monitoring regime, in spite of widespread criticism of that system.

The final agreement also states than while the program is intended to undergo a full review in 2015, three years from the time it was announced, either party can cancel the program with six months’ notice.

Given the program's internal disorder, it is unsurprising the first results commissioned by the monitoring program have only just been publicly released.

A study conducted by Environment Canada shows rising levels of mercury in bird eggs tested downstream from the Alberta tar sands. Some samples taken from the eggs of predatory birds showed traces of mercury that exceed the threshold of what’s considered dangerous. The findings indicate mercury levels could be rising in the fish the birds consume. The report was published online last month by the Environmental Science and Technology Journal.

In spite of what the study’s lead author called a trend of rising levels of mercury, spokeswoman for the Alberta government Jessica Potter told First Nations residents of Fort Chipewyan and Fort McKay that the bird eggs were still safe to eat.

“It’s one study. It doesn’t necessarily indicate a trend. It’s just important that we continue to look into it,” she told the Globe and Mail.

And while the Alberta Government shared the results with those communities and the study was published academically, the results weren't made publicly available on the JOSM Portal website. An agreement signed in June states that all data produced through the program will be publicly accessible via the portal. Although the website lists ongoing testing, many of the results tables state that results will be released in coming months.

Screen shot taken from the JOSM water monitoring page.

Environment Canada researchers said they couldn’t pinpoint the tar sands or any single factor as the cause of mercury increase, though one test revealed that mercury levels had risen two thirds since 1977 and the early days of tar sands' development. Dr. Craig Hebert said coal plants in Asia are a source of elemental gaseous mercury in North America and could possibly be a contributor to the increase.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada's largest oil and gas lobby body and the only non-government body involved in the development of the joint monitoring program, has declined to comment on the results of the latest study.

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It took a solid year of outrage from Canadian researchers, the international science community and the public to force the Harper government to finally agree to transfer the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) to a non-profit organization.

And then the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans tried to take credit for today's announced signing of a crucial Memorandum of Understanding with the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

“The Harper government was being hammered on this from every conceivable angle before they finally buckled,” said Diane Orihel, PhD student at University of Alberta and founder of the Coalition to Save ELA.

The ELA is 45 year old freshwater research facility in northern Ontario considered unique in the world. It was there that Canadian scientists discovered the dangers of acid rain as well as mercury and phosphorus pollution. Regulations that protect the health of the environment in Canada many countries are based on the work done at the ELA.

Claiming a need for austerity the Harper government slashed the budgets of Fisheries and Oceans and Environment Canada last year. The ELA cost the federal government just $2 million a year to operate but it was shuttered March 31st.

For comparison, it cost Canadians $1 million to ship Stephen Harper's armoured limo and SUV to India for a state visit last November.

“This transfer is only happening because independent scientists asked the IISD to try and convince the government to make it happen,” Orihel told DeSmog.

Only a few days ago scientists called on the Harper government to allow access to the ELA to continue world’s longest, whole-lake eutrophication experiment. That experiment is fully funded and crucial to understand the causes of economically devastating algal blooms in freshwater lakes such as Lake Erie she said.

The transfer is not a done deal, many issues remain outstanding however.

“It's a big step forward. The ELA does critically important science for Canada and the rest of the world,” Scott Vaughan, CEO and president of IISD, an internationally respected public policy research institute.

“Saving the ELA is the right thing to do,” Vaughan told DeSmog.

The best part of today's MOU is an agreement to allow scientists back into the ELA to continue their research for balance of the year. Present and future liability, staffing, remediation responsibilities and other legal matters still need to be negotiated. However Fisheries and Oceans are working to address a number of issues with the intent of turning over the ELA to IISD in good shape he said.

Finding $2 million to run the ELA is “a big challenge” for the non-profit IISD that has to fundraise for its core operations. “We didn't take this on lightly,” he acknowledged.

Freshwater and climate change is major part of IISD's work but the organization can't provide good policy advice without good science such as that provided by researchers at the ELA he said.

While Orihel is happy she'll be back at the ELA continuing her research this year, she is disappointed no new research programs will be permitted. One of those ready to go was designed to investigate the environmental impacts of nanosilver particles found in products like food containers, socks, shoe inserts, sports clothing and towels. Nanosilver particles are smaller than a virus and lab research has shown they can mutate fish embryos.

It says a lot about what is happening in Canada that in order to save an invaluable scientific resource it has to be taken out of the hands of government she said.

“A year ago I would never believed I would say I'm delighted the ELA will soon be freed from the shackles of our federal government.”

Image Credit: Diane Orihel via twitter @DianeOrihel.

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MICHAEL HARRIS is an award-winning author, investigative journalist, and documentary filmmaker.

The Harper government knows and cares as much about science as it knows and cares about telling the truth.

That’s what the recent decision to close Canada’s world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) tells anyone who is paying attention.

It also tells us that Environment Minister Peter Kent would have been a great witness at the Scopes Monkey Trial – for the prosecution. We shouldn’t bother jetting this guy to Earth Summits like Rio + 20 just to have him pick up the latest Fossil Award. Put the airfare into the Bev Oda VIP Transportation and Orange Juice Fund and ask the international organizers to mail in our Booby Prize.

I offer these observations after taking a close look at the decision by the federal government to shutter the ELA, yet another deconstruction and downgrading of government science in Canada.

Even Harper acolytes with a picture of Dear Leader in their wallets next to the kids should have a problem with this one. How many independent information bearers does this government have to cut down before even the Harper Moonies start worrying about the Gulag? What does it tell you about someone when they’re always telling other people to keep their mouths shut or else? Isn’t that what Edward G. Robinson does in gangster movies?

Let’s begin at the beginning, or should I say the end? On May 17th of this year, there was an emergency meeting called at the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg. For those who have not been recently canned, these group terminations are as ritualistic as a firing squad. Before the killing shot, the boss reads from a prepared script. As soon as that script comes out, you can be pretty sure that the smell of toast in the room is your career going up in smoke.

At that meeting of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Central and Arctic Division, the person reading the script to 17 hapless employees of the ELA was Michelle Wheatley. The news stories will tell you that she is the Regional Director of Science. What the news stories will not tell you is that she was crying as she broke the news.

With good reason. Her message was as bleak as the first road that was blazed into the then embryonic ELA in the winter of 1968: The installation would be shut down by March 2013; everyone would receive “affected” letters (they did within 24 hours); no new research could be started; and scientists had to get their equipment out of the lakes, all 58 of them – and the labs as soon as possible.

And then, of course, there was the cone of silence that the prime minister expects everyone to wear like a dunce cap after they are “streamlined”. All employees were explicitly warned not to speak with the media. Instead, media requests had to be forwarded to what was risibly referred to as DFO Communications. That is the branch plant of the Ministry of Truth in the PMO that casts the appropriate lights and shadows over the facts for the government and still manages to sleep well at night. You know, the Ignorance is Strength/Freedom is Slavery crowd.

How far has the government been prepared to go to smother the facts surrounding the ELA? For starters, DFO declined all requests from the media to speak with scientists. Being an equal lack-of-opportunity employer, DFO also turned down all requests from its scientists to speak about their work to Canadians. Remember, these are the same people who sent “minders” with scientists to a recent scientific conference in Montreal, lest they stray from the government line in public. I am beginning to suspect that the government line is based on believing that 10,000 years ago Brontosaurs were cropping grass in the back forty.

You will be comforted to know that DFO extended the ban on ELA information to federal MPs. The department turned down MP Bruce Hyer’s request to visit ELA with an ELA scientist. When an outraged university scientist conducting research there offered to take Hyer – who was elected as an NDP MP but now sits as an independent – on a tour of the facility, DFO threatened to cancel his research privileges. Any wonder that acclaimed international scientist Ragnar Elmgren said that this was the kind of thing you would expect from the Taliban, not the government of a western democracy?

Yes, the Harper government decided that the end has come for one of the great scientific enterprises in Canadian history. Consider the record.

Forty-four years ago, a natural freshwater laboratory was created out of a pristine lake system in northwestern Ontario. It was an epical experiment. Although it was about fresh water, not the universe, it was a scientific enterprise of the magnitude of the Hubble Telescope. No other fresh water research station in the world could do what the ELA could in a “whole-environment” research setting. As David Schindler himself put it about the kind of work done at the ELA “This needs to be done in a controlled setting, not in the Athabaska garbage can.”

And what a lot was done.

When DFO itself was amongst the host of visionaries who couldn’t see acid rain, and politicians like Ronald Reagan were publicly questioning the scientific basis for the need to take action, it was the ELA under Schindler that worked to provide the irrefutable evidence that lakes were dying. The work went on from 1976 to 2004. As a result of the findings of Canadian scientists, the EPA in the U.S. took action and new international treaties were established.

The “Metallicus” experiment established a link between atmospheric mercury deposits and mercury in fish. That is a vitally important connection to understand given that 80 percent of the lakes listed in the Guide to Eating Ontario Sport Fish are currently under mercury consumption advisories. ELA research on this deadly neurotoxin and endocrine disruptor has been used by the EPA to design new regulations to control the atmospheric emissions of mercury from coal-fired plants.

Very often, it was the immense scale of the ELA’s outdoor lab that made crucial scientific breakthroughs possible.

That was the case in understanding excessive algal growth in lakes. Small scale studies suggested that carbon was responsible. ELA whole-lake experiments corrected that erroneous conclusion and identified phosphorous as the principle culprit. As a result, governments around the world now restrict phosphorous inputs into lakes. Several countries have banned outright the use of phosphorous in detergents.

Similarly, standard laboratory studies suggested that acidity was directly toxic to lake trout at a pH level of 5; whole-lake experimentation discovered that pH is indirectly toxic to lake trout at -6, or at a rate that is ten times less acidic than previously believed. Why? Because their food source, shrimp and minnows, disappear at the lower levels and the trout starve.

From investigating the role of nitrogen in promoting blue-green algae blooms to the environmental impacts of freshwater aquaculture, from the impacts of hydro reservoir development on greenhouse gases and mercury cycling, to the effects of artificial estrogen on fish populations, ELA has been there. Its scientists have been in the vanguard of original research that has benefitted companies, this country, and the world time after time after time. You don’t get the First Stockholm Water Prize and the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering for goofing off.

So why, unless you had a fetish for killing off Canadian success stories, would the government decide to close the ELA? Why would it leave incomplete original work on the effect of Nano-silver on lakes, (Canada has no specific policies for managing nano-materials in the environment) on growth and survival of fish that escape into the wild from aquaculture facilities, or climate impacts on lakes and their watersheds? None of that work will now be completed. Some innocent souls went to Manitoba Conservative MP Joyce Bateman for the answer, since the Freshwater Institute is in her backyard.

Sadly, there was enough space behind her wide, partisan eyes to park a double-decker bus. Bateman didn’t even know the operational budget for the ELA, and wasn’t aware of its internationally acclaimed work on acid rain, reservoir studies, and nuclear contaminant pathways. Yet she asserted erroneously the facility was no longer productive, parroting lines no doubt given to her by Fisheries minister Keith Ashfield. As Diane Orihel, a PHD candidate in science and the Central Canada Leader for the Coalition to Save ELA put it after her own meeting with Bateman, “I was shocked by her complete and utter ignorance of science and what we do.”

The Opposition didn’t fare much better trying to get answers from Environment Minister Peter Kent. He tried to justify this attack on science by pretending that he just wanted to move our scientists further west “to examine acidification of lakes in western Canada.” Sounds reasonable, right? But the stuff in Kent’s political teleprompter is more head static from mission control. Like his colleague from Manitoba, Kent is operating light years beyond his competence. The research he is talking about has already largely been done and you might be able to guess where – at the ELA.

Most of what the government needs to know about acid rain in the oil sands area was discovered in the early work by David Schindler in Ontario, and reinforced by the work of those who followed him. It is interesting to note that that the original work was funded by the Alberta Oil Sands Environmental Research Program. AOSERP funded the research precisely because the water chemistry of boreal shield lakes in Northern Saskatchewan and Alberta was very similar to the ELA lakes. In other words, the research data collected in northwestern Ontario is a moveable feast. You don’t have to move the scientists.

Not only that, but the minister didn’t understand that earlier ELA research doesn’t need to be replicated at another facility and is actually ready to be applied in the oil sands. That’s because during Schindler’s tenure, the ELA established the biological and chemical thresholds where acidification becomes problematic. The fact that we can now conduct responsible monitoring in the oil sands is a direct result of invaluable research done long ago in northwestern Ontario. The lion’s share of what governments have to do now is bring in responsible monitoring at the oil sands based on ELA research, not reinvent the wheel.

But Minister Kent did get one thing right when he was giving non-answers about this insupportable decision to kill the ELA to the Opposition in the House of Commons early in June. Under questioning from Lac-Saint-Louis Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, Kent crowed that unlike the previous Liberal government, the Harper government isn’t just paying lip service to the environment. But why not use his own ringing words: “We are getting things done.”

And they are. But only if you count gutting the Fisheries Act, killing the ELA, cutting the Institut Maurice-Lamontagne (the only francophone research centre at Fisheries and Oceans), eliminating the water resources strategy group at Environment Canada, and ending groundwater modeling. Even Tory Kool-Aid drinkers would admit that this is an odd way to come up with a national water strategy.

The unkindest cut of all. The federal government talks glibly about finding another operator for the ELA, perhaps a university. Just sell them the millions of dollars worth of upgraded facilities for a dollar. There is only one problem. The major source of funding to Canadian universities that might have supported the ELA has itself been cancelled via the moratorium on NSERC Major Resources Support Program.

The death sentence the government has pronounced on the ELA has nothing to do with the reasons stated. Contrary to claims by people like Kent and Ashfield, the work of the ELA is aligned with departmental priorities in both Fisheries and Environment.

If the main priorities of DFO, for example, are: fish populations, community productivity, habitat and population linkages, climate change and variability, and ecosystem management, all of these are studied at ELA.

It is false to say there is a similar facility in the world, let alone in northern Saskatchewan. There is only one ELA.

It is false to use cost savings as the rationale for the cut. Most of the research cost of the ELA are not paid for by government.

The costs of the installation, divided between EC and DFO according to a 2007 Memorandum of Understanding, are embarrassingly modest – $2 million annually, including approximately $650K for operating costs and the balance in salaries.

And here is a truly shameful number. How much do you think each of the four ELA/DFO scientists receives annually to cover their research expenses? Two thousand bucks. Bottom line. Canadians pay ten times more for the PM’s security detail than they do for this world class science facility. They paid ten times more for the celebration of the War of 1812. For the price of a single F-35, ELA’s operational budget could be financed for the next 150 years.

That’s why there’s not a chance that the Harper government will take David Schindler up on a very reasonable request. If you are going to wipe out 44 years of work, spark a scientific diaspora from the federal government, and create a white elephant out in the wilderness that will cost untold millions to “remediate”, do the intelligent thing and conduct an audit this summer to see if the facts support that course of action.

The government won’t do that because it is all about putting independent voices out of business, voices that if heard might persuade the public that Harper doesn’t necessarily know best. The PM believes in strategic communication – the amassing of friendly facts and pseudo facts and big fat lies that advance a chosen agenda. His approach to governance is like a bad PhD thesis. Science is about applying empirical tests in controlled situations with predictive validity aimed at finding the facts. The two schools are natural enemies, as antithetical as William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow.

Stephen Harper does not believe in funding any organization that might become a critic, even inadvertently, in pursuit of the facts. So he probably will look with favor on a suggestion by a Winnipeg-based money manager who has a plan to save the ELA.

Tim Burt is the chief executive officer of Cardinal Capital Management. He has written a letter to the heads of six oil companies asking that they assume the funding of the ELA previously provided by Ottawa. It turns out that he is also the riding association president for Winnipeg South Centre Conservative MP, one Joyce Bateman. Fortunately, Mr. Burt assures one and all that there is no political motive behind his suggestion.

Of course not, Tim. What could be political about handing over the funding for an independent scientific institution to the very private sector owners whose industries would be most affected by its investigations?

Now if only Suncor, Cenovus, and Imperial see the light.

Image Credit: PMO Image Gallery.

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