From the Archipelago: Orchestra of Life

October-November 2006

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Alexandra Morton

In the twenty-two years that I have lived in the Broughton Archipelago I have never seen a more spectacular explosion of life than this year. Watching this place is something like listening to an orchestra warm up. You hear the violins, the drums and the flute each play sweet notes and then suddenly they strike a chord together and the effect is something wondrously rich, resonating, soul stirring. This is what the Broughton has felt like this year.

My first inkling that this year would be special was the repeated hatches of some species of euphausid. On my way home from counting sea lice, the water turned pale pink beneath my boat and was alive with tiny splashes. I halted and hung over the side for a better look. Down as far as I could see was a living spiral of tiny shrimp or krill. The immense twister looked white but as it arched towards the surface it became rosy. Beneath that was a floor of flickering silver—thousands of young Coho feasting greedily.

In previous years my beach seines rarely caught Coho smolts. This year I caught up to a hundred per set. These hungry predators shadowed the beleaguered pink salmon fry like tiny sharks. There were so few young pink salmon this spring, the Coho would have starved, but there were millions of sandlance also growing up in the Brougthon this spring. At first we dubbed them ‘rice noodles’ as the tiny translucent fish appeared in out nets. When we lowered the corkline, they poured out, rippling away into the depths. As they grew, their bodies silvered until looking down on them was like watching a constellation twinkling against the dark.

Then the pilchard showed. These fish are about 16 cm long, tightly clad in large blue scales. Pilchard are dedicated schoolers and suffer or thrive as one. Looking down on them is dizzying as they weave a spiral in on themselves. The leaders change shift by lifting from the masses, drifting sideways an instant, then diving into the school to become a follower.

Pilchard often swim with their upper lip against the surface, catching the sun-loving plankton. I saw swarms of them chasing the capelin in high-speed attacks across Fife Sound this year. I lived in my boat all summer and slept many nights among the pilchard feeding and schooling below my hull.

In late April the ‘herring hordes’ appeared and we quickly learned not to set our nets near them, as herring are not net savvy and drive themselves into the mesh. I don’t know where they came from and I haven’t seen them in previous years, but obviously some inlet nearby had a fantastic herring spawn this spring, and it’s a joy to see these young fish growing up here.

By summer the humpback whales arrived. Humpbacks used to be year-round residents in the waters off eastern Vancouver Island. Then whaling stations appeared along our coast and quickly killed them off. My neighbor Billy Proctor remembers the vessel Nahmint towing nine whales out of Knight Inlet many years ago. When I arrived in this area in 1979, no one ever thought to see a humpback whale. Then in 1985 three appeared. Two or three were sporadically seen through the 90s. When the pilchard arrived in 1997, more and more humpback whales put this area on their calendar. Sometimes the pilchard stay near Port Hardy and the whales stop there, and sometimes the fish come down to Blackfish Sound and the Broughton and the whales follow. There have been at least 27 humpback whales in this area this summer, several with babies.

It’s not been all good news here. Several whales were hit badly by speeding boats. One infant humpback had great scoops painfully carved out of her tail by a propeller in August.

And coastlines that should have been full of young pink salmon were empty. Sea lice infections were apparent out near Port McNeill and Sointula on sockeye and other young salmon, likely from the fish farm processing plants and their packers. And despite all the science, the First Nation opposition and the recorded impacts, a new salmon feedlot company (Greig) was allowed to move into the Broughton and plant itself on one of the most productive wild salmon locations, which will ensure the transfer of farm pathogens to wild salmon and visa versa.

However, for species not under assault by humanity, the summer of 2006 was a powerful opportunity to thrive.

Ocean productivity, the mysterious interplay of global winds and temperature, struck a harmonic chord that resonated through the foodchain this year. If we were really smart, we would take our place within this orchestra of life, quit banging discordant pots and pans like an angry child and learn to work with these superbly powerful forces of life. For therein lies our only future.

I feel lucky to have witnessed this year of abundance. But it’s silly to think we can get away with breaking natural laws. Crowding salmon into fouled conditions will always breed pestilence. The desire to own life, sever and twist the foodchain, to convert it into a commodity, is something we must outgrow or we will suffer the consequences. Nature is generous but she is also ruthless.

© Alexandra Morton, R.P.Bio. is a researcher and author. www.raincoastresearch.org.

WHAT IS FARMED FISH?
“This farmed animal is clearly not a ‘salmon’. It has been entirely stripped of all ecological and cultural context, interdependencies and regionally based genetic specificity. It has become just another homogenised, industrial, mass produced commodity.”

From the Wild Salmon Manifesto by Dr. John Volpe and Dr. Sinclair Philip, which passed unanimously at the National Meeting of Slow Food Canada in Calgary, April 2006.