Alexandra Morton.
Alexandra Morton – Director and founder
Since the late 1980s, biologist Alexandra Morton has pioneered scientific research on salmon farm impacts on whales and wild salmon in the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw territory (Broughton Archipelago). For more than 30 years, she has studied the wild orca that depend on wild salmon of British Columbia’s Pacific Coast.
Morton’s ground-breaking research measures the risks salmon farms pose to wild salmon. She has discovered epidemic outbreaks of parasitic infections in wild salmon and documented how salmon farms drove resident whales out of the archipelago.
In 1981, Morton founded Raincoast Research Society and has tirelessly championed public awareness of salmon farm impacts on whales, wild salmon and other species:
- In 1999, she co-founded the Broughton Archipelago Stewardship Alliance. This society was set up to hire and educate local people to assess, monitor and restore small salmon-bearing creeks.
- In 2010, she helped found the Salmon Are Sacred movement to increase awareness of the impact of salmon farms on wild salmon.
- As director of Pacific Coast Wild Salmon Society, Morton produced the film Salmon Confidential, seen by more than 1-million online viewers and screened at numerous film festivals, winning Most Popular Canadian Environmental Documentary Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. She also produced the booklet Salmon Confidential: The ugly truth about Canada’s open-net salmon farms – demonstrating how the benefits from BC’s wild salmon-based economy far outweigh those of salmon farms.
- In 2014, Morton was featured by CBS 60 Minutes addressing the negative impacts of salmon farms.
Researching whales and the keystone species that support them
Morton settled in Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation’s territory to study wild orca in 1984. She made her home with filmmaker Robin Morton in Echo Bay – a community without roads, electricity or stores.
She set out to document the acoustic lives of the resident orca in the archipelago. At the time, little was known about how these whales survive in the winter months.
One of Morton’s major discoveries revealed how differences in feeding habits between resident and transient orca led each community to different lifestyles and behaviours. Her research showed the waters around Kingcome Inlet to be a winter feeding ground for resident A5 pod. This was before the orca were displaced by high amplitude noise devices used to scare seals from salmon farms.
Morton is the author of six books about whales and her life on the coast.
Salmon farm impacts research
By the 1990s, ecological impacts from a burgeoning salmon farm industry in the archipelago began to appear. To protect the resident salmon-eating orca, Morton expanded her work to study salmon farm impacts on the orca’s main food supply – wild salmon.
- Between 2003 and 2015, Morton has published extensive scientific research on the impact of sea lice from salmon farms on wild BC salmon.
- Then, after beginning tracking three European salmon farm viruses in BC wild salmon in 2011, she published on the piscine reovirus in 2013, infectious salmon anemia virus in 2016 and marine policy associated with salmon farms.
- In 2015, Morton and Ecojustice lawyers won a lawsuit against a private fish farming company and Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. The federal court struck down aquaculture license conditions that allowed the transfer of fish infected with viruses into open-pen farms in the ocean. DFO and Marine Harvest, the largest Atlantic salmon farming company in BC, appealed this decision, but dropped the appeal when piscine reovirus, which infects 80% of BC farm salmon, was found to cause diseas in BC farms. DFO refuses to abide by this court ruling, and so Morton has sued the Minister of Fisheries to motivate him to follow the law and protect wild salmon from farm salmon disease.