Excerpted from The New Fish: The Truth about Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore ©2023 by Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli. Reprinted with permission by Patagonia.
Chapter 10: A Salmon Researcher Is Silenced
Around this time, something inexplicable happened to the wild salmon in North America. Kristi Miller-Saunders had seen it while growing up in California—in the Sacramento Valley the salmon were almost gone and the disappearances were spreading up the coast to Canada. There were five species of salmon and three were in sharp decline: the coho, the chinook, and the sockeye.
The decline was spasmodic—awful one year, big hauls the next—but over time the curve descended. The survival rates dropped abruptly. In Canada, there were still many people who made a living from the wild salmon, and now they were desperate and angry. The authorities were at a loss. Why was the salmon disappearing? Was it something we humans had done? Could the course of the next salmon year be predicted? These were the questions dropped in Miller-Saunders’ lap when she was recruited by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), the Canadian directorate of fisheries. She was to study salmon genetics. She came to Canada for its natural beauty.
In Canada, there were still many people who made a living from the wild salmon, and now they were desperate and angry. The authorities were at a loss.
We take in its immensity from the car as we drive up Vancouver Island. Snow-capped mountains, rivers, fjords, remote islands. The big salmon rivers that wind their way down from glaciers and springs inland were long considered to be among the best in the world. For hours we drive through desolate forests. It gets dark, and we often see signs that warn of timber trucks crossing. Every now and then, vehicle lights appear in the distance. The people we meet are down-to-earth, hardy, and taciturn. One of the few gas stations displays all kinds of liquor behind the counter; it also sells knives the length of swords.
“This is hunting country,” mumbles the man behind the counter.
“What do you hunt?”
“Bears.”
For some, this landscape is fearsome and wild, while others, such as Miller-Saunders, fall in love with it. After coming here on vacation, she wanted to do her master’s degree here. “This is paradise,” she wrote to her parents. She could go downhill skiing and night diving during the same day.
She was fascinated by sea life. During her studies, she researched crustaceans, cephalopods, jellyfish, annelids, snails, and shellfish and was interested in how the species competed with one another and in all the unfathomable things that happen in the deep without humans noticing. After completing her doctorate in the United States, she moved to Canada and got a job at one of DFO’s research stations, where she was to map the genetic material of the salmon. She was to contribute to better management, differentiate between the species, and study genetic variations.
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Wild salmon migrate between freshwater and the ocean, then back again to freshwater. These transitions are stressful, and the salmon has to be healthy to survive. She asked herself what the difference was between salmon that died and those that lived, and from this came another research question: What kinds of diseases affected the wild salmon? What role did these diseases play in the bigger mystery of why the salmon were disappearing?
She developed a method for monitoring pathogens—viruses and bacteria that made the salmon sick. Infection from the farmed salmon pens loomed in the background.
In 2011, Miller-Saunders published an article in the journal Science about salmon in the Fraser River. She and her colleagues had worked on it for two years. By studying gene activity, they found out more about the salmon that were dying prematurely. Toward the end of the article, they questioned the extent to which a new, unnamed virus could be causing salmon to die in larger numbers than before.
Being published in Science is no mean feat for a researcher (or for an industry). Afterward, you are expected to give interviews to the media. Salmon is important to Canada, and several journalists had indicated their interest in her work.
Miller-Saunders was told that the communications department wanted to schedule the interviews for her. Until now, she had conducted her research in private and wasn’t used to giving interviews. She waited but heard nothing back. The journalists grew impatient. The day before the Science article was to be published, she still hadn’t heard when the interviews would take place.
Finally, the communications department got in touch. They had canceled her interviews.
From Miller-Saunders’ office in the coastal city of Nanaimo, we can see the ocean. On the wall are pictures of sockeye, the Pacific salmon species that seems strange to us Europeans. Its body is red, its mouth long and crooked. Miller-Saunders speaks quickly and enthusiastically, her technical language is that of the specialist. She now runs the genetics and genome program at the research station.
“I told the journalists that they would have to talk to my coauthors,” she remembers. “It was frustrating. I didn’t know then that I’d be silenced and that this would continue.”
At first, she was instructed to just wait a while. She was asked to present her research findings at a hearing on why the salmon were disappearing, the so-called Cohen Commission. It was better that she spoke there.
She didn’t mind waiting, but soon she wasn’t allowed to participate in scientific meetings where there might be a media presence. And then she wasn’t allowed to give lectures. The media started to dig into the matter. Had she been instructed to remain silent by her employer, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO)?
Interest grew. Had she discovered something really awful about the salmon industry? What did she know that the authorities wanted to hide?
When she was finally due before the Cohen Commission, DFO took precautions.
“They didn’t want me to talk to the public, so I was put in a hotel no one knew about,” she says.
She had to use the hotel’s back door. “I was told not to talk to anyone. It was scary. After all, I’m just an ordinary researcher.”
The day she was to testify, she was picked up early in the morning.
“I was to enter the court via the back door, accompanied by a bodyguard . . . He was to keep people away from me. He went out, checked the elevator, said the coast was clear, and ushered me out of the car. Then I was taken to the back room.”
This felt absurd.
“The bodyguard and two communications people followed me wherever I went.”
Members of the public squeezed onto the rows of benches in the courtroom. Journalists who couldn’t get in watched on screens. TV footage showed activists outside wearing T-shirts with pictures of her and the motto “It’s Miller time!” She heard that some of them were collecting money to finance her research.
“It was madness,” she says.
Unnerved and feeling like people were expecting something spectacular, she took the stand.
How could testimony from a researcher trigger such a spectacle? One reason is suspense. Absence of information generates interest. That’s why crime novels never reveal the identity of the murderer on the first page. And like those authors, we want to draw you further into our story, since what follows is a somewhat complicated explanation of why salmon fishing is so contentious in Canada…
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