The Virus Hunters: Making Knowledge and Contested Evidence in Atlantic Salmon Aquaculture
Darcey Evans
UCLA
Strange Pacific salmon bodies wash ashore throughout coastal British Columbia. Their gills are exceptionally pale when they should be bright red. Spleens are swollen, livers turned to the color of mustard, and many of their scales are tinged a strange shade of light yellow— all of which are potential signs of disease. The waterscapes of British Columbia’s coast are made through Pacific salmon migrations. Yet, the region now struggles with its status as both the Pacific salmon “capital of the world” and the epicenter of the Atlantic salmon aquaculture industry on Canada’s west coast. As I attended community meetings and consultations, accompanied fishers to fishing grounds and aquaculture sites, and participated in campaigns that urged government agencies to initiate new salmon pathogen testing programs, the apprehension that these yellow salmon were caused by pathogens seeping from the farms of Atlantic salmon scattered throughout the region remained omnipresent.
In this piece, I describe how a diverse alliance of Indigenous leaders, fishers, scientists, scuba-divers, and coastal residents make knowledge about food and farm systems by taking on the role of “virus hunters” to document salmon farms and the presence of aquatic pathogens. Virus hunting becomes a form of “popular epidemiology” (Brown 1997) that marshals community engagement to intervene in the politics of knowledge production that concentrates authority and expertise behind the closed-doors of corporate and governmental offices. Grassroots efforts to track aquatic pathogens not only produce data that help to “prove” environmental harm, they also exceed the possibilities offered by the state by insisting on understanding the effects of industrial food production beyond the farm. This is part of creating what Michelle Murphy might call a new “regime of perceptibility” in which creative, experimental practices are able to render pathogens into a materially present, “perceptible, definable, knowable object” (Murphy 2006, 5). Yet, the forms of evidence that such virus hunting endeavors produce are rarely taken seriously by the scientific and legal apparatus of the state. When what counts as truth and what counts as evidence are always contested, exercises in hunting viruses generate epistemic openings for reimagining the ways that farmed salmon and their pathogens are known and encountered.
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In sheltered bays usually not too far from the shoreline, a collection of square nets floats at the water’s surface. Each net extends into the water column fifty feet; collectively, they will house 500,000 Atlantic salmon at a time and the entire facility is anchored to the seafloor by a mooring system of anchors, ropes, and weights. A salmon farm is often a surprisingly unspectacular and ordinary place— at least as experienced from the water’s surface. However, there are many things that cannot be seen from the surface of the water. Life in and around and these fish cities swells and recedes in tune with the rhythms of seasons, currents, and tides. Muscles, mollusks, and seaweeds find a nutrient-rich home on the nets. Herring, juvenile salmon, and wrasse swim in and out of the mesh holes. While the farm might hold hundreds of thousands of fish, millions of other creatures, from microscopic shrimp and algae to plump seals and energetic salmon smolts, find a plentiful food buffet in the waters surrounding a farm.
Pathogens have particularly captured the attentions of coastal residents. When viruses also seep beyond the nets, broader aquatic ecologies become enveloped within the relations of industrial production sustained on the farm. Local scientists and nonprofits report that certain viruses are “ubiquitous among farmed salmon” and that the pens of Atlantic salmon could be exposing Pacific salmon to pathogens never-before documented on the Pacific coast. Government and industry responses, meanwhile, reassure nervous publics that farmed salmon are healthy even if they carry certain viruses, that biosecurity protocols prevent inter-species transmission of pathogens, and that aquaculture does not cause harm to Pacific salmon. As salmon-turned-yellow continued to appear on river banks and in fishing nets, we struggled to make sense of the conflicting information.
In efforts to discern how pathogens materialize within and beyond the farm, Indigenous leaders from Liǧʷiłdax̌ʷ, ʼNa̱mǥis, Dzawada̱ʼenux̱w, ƛaʔuukwiiʔatḥ and other nations in whose territories the farms are anchored travel to sites of aquaculture production, seeking to gather film footage of fish within the pens. They strap GoPro cameras to their heads and mount cameras to poles, which, when submerged, provide a visible form of access to the underwater worlds within the pens. They are looking for things that are not supposed to be there— this might be other fish such as herring, industrial debris such as discarded netting, or signs of disease, such as lesions, discoloration, or scale anomalies.
Videos and images of fish with lesions, discolorations, and deformities now circulate on Facebook feeds, YouTube pages, and NGO email threads.[1] When such cinematic forms of evidence spurred state-led investigations into aquaculture practices, a watchdog organization based in Scotland declared that “the GoPro has dealt salmon farming the death blow in Canada” (Staniford 2021). But, viruses are not generally visible at the level of the handheld camera. The visual evidence created through filming the pens with underwater cameras might hint at certain health maladies but, as a BC Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA) spokesperson later pointed out, “you can’t diagnose disease with a GoPro camera” (Koch 2019).
[1] An example of the types of images and videos produced through such virus hunting endeavors can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kucvFJMSJEk&list=PLNmnNu36NAjg23X_HuS9FrxM0QiJtlHTq&index=32
In order for evidence of viral spread to be considered actionable by the state, pathogens must be confirmed through genetic testing. Working to meet this threshold of proof, community members collect water, feces, scales, and chunks of flesh and fat that drift out of the pens. Others take to grocery stores where farmed salmon are sold. They look for the freshest fish with the longest “Best Before” dates and fill their grocery carts, quickly rushing their purchases to ice chests in the parking lot. They begin awkward dissections of fish bodies kneeled on the tarmac in-between cars, carefully placing slices of gills and kidneys into vials for laboratory testing. The grocery store salmon tested positive for Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV)— a virus carried by the majority of farmed Atlantic salmon and known to be potentially lethal to both Atlantic and Pacific salmon.
A wooden carving in the shape of a salmon reads "Test Me For Piscine Reovirus." Piscine reovirus (also known as Piscine orthoreovirus or PRV) is a virus associated with and amplified by Atlantic salmon aquaculture facilities.
However, even when pathogens can be confirmed genetically, it remains contested as to whether such pathogens are related to aquaculture or how they might impact Pacific salmon beyond farm boundaries. As one microbiologist told me, shrugging his shoulders, when I asked him about PRV: “Just because a fish has the virus does not mean it will develop into disease. People are afraid of importing a foreign disease, but they don’t know if it’s foreign, if it causes disease, or if it transfers to wild fish.” In line with such statements, government agencies refused to test for PRV, maintaining that it was not a virus of concern.
These forms of virus hunting are augmented by scuba-divers, who swim to the underwater outflow pipes of a processing facility where farmed salmon are gutted and filleted in order to collect water samples from the plumes of blood that billow into the waterscape via pipes from the facility. The blood-water also tested positive for PRV. For coastal residents working to remove aquaculture from the coast, the effluent plumes are a bloody visualization of the vectors behind the spread of pathogens and an unpleasant reminder that the effects of raising industrial salmon can often only be seen underwater and can radiate from far beyond the farms themselves. In a similar refrain, however, the Executive Director of the BCSFA refuted such forms of evidence, suggesting that he “can’t know” whether the presence of the virus in the blood-water came from the processing plant or was already present in the ocean before the effluent entered the waterscape (Smart 2017).
It might be easy to explain such disputes as a production of official ignorance, a reflection of the state and industry’s reliance on uncertainty to uphold the status quo (e.g. Callison 2014; Mathews 2011; Norgaard 2011; Viatori 2016). However, such contestations over what can be considered a legitimate form of evidence are, I think, part of a broader epistemic power struggle concerning contrasting ways of knowing disease. Under current fish health laws, only if a virus is confirmed through genetic testing and found to be the causative agent of disease will a change in regulations be proposed. Yet, the unpredictable movements of microbes through supply chains, ocean currents, and ecological interactions troubles the normative relationships of causality on which state regulatory systems depend. Official biosecurity narratives often fail to convince fishers and coastal residents, whose long histories of encountering disfigured and diseased fish bodies make them skeptical that laboratories and city conference rooms can properly account for the unknown ways that pathogens move throughout the waterscape.
By traveling to salmon spawning rivers, grocery stores, underwater outflow pipes, and sites of aquaculture production, hunting viruses becomes a practice in careful noticing that generates evidence of environmental harm that exceeds what is monitored and tracked by the state. It is a form of collective knowledge-making and alliance-building that attempts to recognize and encounter changes within the waterscape by being in-situ. Such grassroots forms of evidence-making also exceed the hunt for viruses alone. When Indigenous and other community leaders use underwater cameras to film fish within the farm, they are not only attempting to learn about the health of fish within the pens. They are also addressing the disappearance of birds that has followed the disappearance of salmon, the acoustic harassment devices that prompt whales to abandon their ancient migration routes, the leaching of chemical and biological wastes that render nearby shellfish unsafe for consumption, and the yellow salmon that wash ashore throughout the region. The hunt for viruses becomes a method for sensing the long-term and intersecting consequences of industrialization and ecosystem change.
Meanwhile, Pacific salmon remain absent from their migration routes and spawning grounds. Elongated summer nights no longer reverberate with the sound of gentle rain as Pacific salmon jump at the water’s surface, but are interrupted by sporadic splashes like those of a skipping stone as lone fish jump. Each splash that never happens is a reminder of how few the fish have become. Although there are no ways to account for quiet waters and mysterious disappearing and yellow fish within the technical standards used by the state to recognize harm, tracking farmed salmon and their viruses are just one way that coastal residents in BC try to prevent the world-ending reality of Pacific salmon extinction. Virus hunting provides an epistemic opening, a way of making knowledge and generating evidence about farmed salmon and their pathogens in ways that are perceptible and actionable, even if causality remains contested.
References
Brown, Phil. 1997. “Popular Epidemiology Revisited.” Current Sociology 45 (3):137–56.
Callison, Candis. 2014. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Durham: Duke University Press.
Koch, David. 2019. “Sea Shepherd Releases Footage after Pamela Anderson Boards Fish Farm.” The Victoria News, July 31, 2019. https://www.vicnews.com/news/video- sea-shepherd-releases-video-after-pamela-anderson-boards-fish-farm-59019.
Mathews, Andrew S. 2011. Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Murphy, Michelle. 2006. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Durham: Duke University Press.
Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Smart, Amy. 2017. “Sample of B.C. Farmed-Salmon ‘Blood Water’ Tests Positive for Virus: Critic.” The Vancouver Sun, November 29, 2017. https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/sample-of-b-c-farmed-salmon-blood-water-tests-positive-for-virus-critic.
Staniford, Don. 2021. “Caught on Camera- How the Go Pro Dealt the Death Blow to Salmon Farming.” October 15, 2021. https://donstaniford.typepad.com/my-blog/2021/10/caught-on-camera-how-the-go-pro-dealt-salmon-farming-the-death-blow.html.
Viatori, Maximilian. 2016. “Public Secrets, Muzzled Science: Agnotological Practice, State Performance, and Dying Salmon in British Columbia.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39 (S1): 89–103.