American Magazine | Spring 2007
Listening for Silence
A scientist fights for threatened Echo Bay
It was love at first listen. Alexandra Morton, CAS/BS ’77, cut the engine on her 13-foot inflatable Zodiac raft, drifting for a moment through the Broughton Archipelago, a maze of islands and channels off the Pacific Canadian coast. She reached over the side, dropped her underwater microphone overboard, and heard the sound she’d been seeking for years. Silence.
She listened intently through her headphones, scanning a green horizon that looked to her like the end of the known world. All around her, the sky balanced on a straightedge of ocean studded by dozens of islands inhabited by little more than 60-foot firs and cedars. Beside her in the boat, her husband, Robin, and two-year-old son, Jarrett, waited. They’d been sleeping aboard an old 65-foot wooden boat for two years, getting by selling charter trips for fishermen and tourists and regularly setting out in their Zodiac to follow whales toward a place they’d begun to think didn’t exist.
But now Morton’s headphones had something else to say about that. There was no roar from Pacific cruise ship engines, no buzz from the tug boats chugging up Johnston Strait. She heard only the faint rustle of pebbles licked by the ripples in nearby inlets.
She waited.
Then came the reason she’d been searching for the silence. A slow rolling moan rose, stretched, modulated, fell back to silence, and then echoed against the steep underwater banks not once, not twice, but five times.
The sound, which Morton had heard many times before but never so clearly, was the call of a killer whale from a pod she’d been following for four years. The body of water, home to a half-dozen killer whales and a community of 100 fishermen and loggers, was Echo Bay. The search for the perfect spot to conduct her research on whale communication—a slice of ocean with year-round whales, a human population large enough for a school for Jarrett, and most importantly silent waters—was over.
“One day,” recalls Morton more than two decades later, “we just followed the whales up to Echo Bay, and we never left.”
A home on the bay
From 1984 to 1987 Morton and her family reveled in the coastal wilderness. After graduating from AU with her bachelor’s degree in biology in 1977, Morton had studied captive killer whales in Los Angeles, but living among wild whales offered new discoveries for both her and her wildlife filmmaker husband. The first scientist to study year-round whale behavior, she uncovered new complexities in orca communication, helped identify and track dozens of pods, and deepened scientific knowledge on the differences between fish-eating and mammal-eating whales.
“I long for those days,” she says. “My husband and I went out every single day. Rain, sun, snow, calm, windy. We put a canopy over the front of the Zodiac, and our little guy was in there with us. Poor thing. Today, he says he was raised in a Zodiac.”
Even after her husband died in a diving accident in 1987, the whales kept Morton in Echo Bay, where life as a single mother posed constant challenges. She learned how to get by without electricity, keep a child occupied for hours in a 13-foot boat, scare away curious grizzly bears, and keep her balance in a house floating on a bundle of logs—all for the opportunity to spend each day in the company of whales.
“The float-house was wonderful,” she says, only half joking about the style of housing that dominated Echo Bay. “You could turn your whole house around if you want to. If you don’t want the morning sun coming into your kitchen anymore, you pull yourself around and have it in your living room. Of course, you go up and down with the tides, and sometimes you get hung up on the beach. Then your house jumps off the rocks, and there’s this great shudder—you’d think it’s an earthquake.”
By the late 1980s, when the salmon farms that would change her life came, Morton had grown expert enough in remote living to offer herself to the salmon farmers as the welcome wagon. “I actually called them and said if the women coming in here want to know how you live out here, have them call me,” she says. “If I knew what I know now . . .”
She’d hoped the farms would ease fishing pressure on the wild salmon that fed her subjects, maybe bring more jobs for the neighbors, more kids for the one-room school house Jarrett attended. In a few years, however, she discovered that the salmon farms had brought with them something else entirely.
The sounds of trouble
On a cold January day in 1993, Morton drifted on the waters of the Broughton Archipelago as she did every day, engine cut, headphones on, ready to take notes on the whales’ behavior as she recorded their calls. The water stretched out still as a sheet of ice, no sign of any pods nearby. Curious about their absence, Morton reached over the side, dropped the hydrophone in for a listen, and winced as a buzz saw tore through her headphones.
“I ripped those suckers off,” she recalls. “I was in pain.”
The sound, she would discover, came from an “acoustic harassment device,” a tool salmon farms had adopted to drive seals from their fish-filled nets with an underwater roar nearly 50 decibels louder than a jet engine. And if it hurt her ears, Morton could only imagine what it was doing to the whales.
“A killer whale’s primary sense is acoustic,” she explains, describing their sonar-like echolocation process. “Imagine that every call is like a searchlight going around and around so that as it comes back they get this pulse of vision of whole structures—rocks, boats, other whales, schools of fish. This would basically be like a human walking into a room full of needles coming right for your eyeball.”
The impact was drastic. Over the next days and weeks she watched the whales fight to enter the archipelago, leaping out of the water repeatedly to escape the noise. Over the next months and years, she watched them disappear. “One by one,” she recalls, “the families came in, [left], and never came back.”
Morton soon found that acoustic harassment was just one problem the salmon farms had brought to the Broughton Archipelago. News of furunculosis on the farms popped up in the chatter on her VHF radio. Young coho salmon in a nearby hatchery turned up dead, their bodies littered with red-ringed sores. Gas dock conversations hinted at farmed salmon with antibiotic resistant infections.
“This was like neon light,” says Morton. “There were big problems here.” In the wild, she explains, sick fish are slow fish, making them food for predators and preventing them from infecting their school. In captivity, protected by nets, swimming in their own waste, and treated with medication, sick fish survive long enough to infect other fish—even those outside their nets.
If that weren’t troubling enough, Morton also learned that bacteria wasn’t the only thing escaping the nets. When salmon farms arrived, she explains, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) promised that the transplanted Atlantic salmon farm fish could never escape their nets, would never survive in the wild, and would never eat local fish. The radio aboard Morton’s Zodiac, however, told a different story.
“In the summer I’d switch it on and hear commercial fishermen cursing about Atlantic salmon in their nets,” she says. “Each year the DFO reported how many fish escaped . . . but the numbers just didn’t seem to jibe. I mean, a lot of guys were talking about a lot of these fish a lot of the time.”
Staying on the sidelines
Morton knew someone needed to study and report all this, but it wasn’t going to be her. “Throughout my career I had made a decision,” she says. “I was not going to get involved in any environmental issues.” When friends had organized to fight whale captivity or logging’s impact on nearby watersheds, she’d always stayed on the sidelines.
“As a young scientist, I just didn’t want to risk getting involved,” she explains. “If you’re studying killer whales and communication, you already risk being called a flake. I’d fought really hard to be seen as a scientist.”
According to AU’s director of environmental studies, Kiho Kim, many natural scientists of Morton’s generation faced this same problem. “For a long time, there was a very clear and painful line between science and policy,” Kim explains. “Science is incredibly objective, but political issues are about perception . . . So there was this thought that if you talked about policy or advocated anything, it would undermine your scientific objectivity.”
And besides, Morton had followed whales throughout her career. The whales had left Echo Bay; perhaps it was time for her to leave too. “I really didn’t know what I was doing here,” she recalls. “The whales were gone. I felt like I should just pick up and go where they were.”
‘A biologist on watch’
But something had changed during her decade in Echo Bay. Somewhere in that struggle to keep the floor from freezing, chop firewood to heat the bath water, and raise her son, Morton’s research station had become her home. “There’s this thing about raising your child somewhere,” she says. “Somehow you just become attached to that place . . . Echo Bay was my home, and I think there’s a long record of mothers protecting their homes.”
That summer, Morton launched a new research project. In a four-week period she traveled from one commercial fishing boat to the next and counted 10,826 Atlantic salmon in their nets. Then she went to a packing plant, searched the “gut bags” for the stomachs of 700 cleaned Atlantic salmon, and spotted the tell tale Pacific salmon inside. The DFO reports, she recalls, were way off the mark.
“I realized I was a biologist on watch,” she says. “Salmon wasn’t my field, but there was nobody who was going to come and do this work.”
To tackle her new field, Morton began corresponding and collaborating with scientists around the world, forming Raincoast Research, a research society focused on the environmental impact of salmon farming. Specialists from as far away as Norway, home to salmon farms since the early ’70s, offered both technical support and eerie warnings of what was to come.
“Whenever I talked to a Norwegian scientist, it was the same thing,” Morton recalls. “They said, ‘Oh, you have salmon farms. Do you have the sea lice epidemic yet?’” The more she read, the happier she was Echo Bay didn’t have the sea lice problem. Numerous studies from Scotland and Norway taught her that when allowed to grow to epidemic proportions in salmon farms, the tiny crustaceans destroyed entire runs of wild salmon, which had dire consequences for the environment.
Salmon, Morton explains, provide more to the coast than just whale food. In addition to supporting fishermen, salmon sustain an entire ecosystem. “Salmon are the lifeblood of the coast,” she says. “Watersheds are nutrient starved systems. Everything in them is running downhill. Salmon go out into the ocean and bring back nutrients when they return to spawn. They feed eagles, bears, wolves. Their remains even seep into the soil and provide nutrients for the trees.”
A voice in the wilderness
In 2001, a neighbor and fishing lodge owner sailed over to Morton’s house with a bucket. Worry burned red across his face. He’d heard about sea lice from guests who traveled across the globe to fish at his lodge, where the salmon—he’d long been sure—were still lice free.
“Alex, what is this?” he asked, the chords standing out on his neck as he held out the bucket for her.
Morton leaned forward to take a look. Inside she saw two juvenile salmon swimming lazily, their silver bodies coated with tiny pink circles. “Oh my God,” she thought, “the epidemic is here.”
Morton needed to move fast. It was June, leaving little time to record what was happening before the end of the juvenile migration. And there was another problem. She had no idea how to do the research.
“I didn’t even think I could catch these little fish,” she laughs. “But I had grown up with a net in my hand catching frogs and turtles. So I got some pipe and I bent it. I put a screen on it, went out on my boat, and started to hunt these things down. I felt like a 10-year-old again at the frog pond . . . But while I’m doing this I’m sending e-mails off to Norway and Scotland, saying ‘Do you know how to do this?’”
That first summer she caught and counted the sea lice on 700 salmon. Over the next few years she refined her technique, using a 150-foot seining net to catch and count the sea lice on thousands without killing them. Working with Simon Fraser University scientist Rick Routledge, Morton published several studies proving that salmon farm sea lice were infecting and killing young wild salmon.
In 2003 her work convinced the salmon farmers and the DFO to move the farms off the wild salmon migration routes. That year she documented the largest rebound in the species’ population in history. But the farms moved back in 2004 refusing to abandon the migration routes again because they’d suffered lower profits and claimed the rebound was only coincidence. Morton wrote hundreds of letters to the DFO pleading her case for the farms’ permanent removal but received only polite denials.
Getting the word out
Frustrated, she continued publishing sea lice research but simultaneously launched a new strategy. “I realized if I was the only person seeing this, then nothing was going to happen,” she explains. “So I set up a bunch of tours and brought different groups out here. We’d pick out a piece of coast, seine for fish, and I’d show them the sea lice.”
On one trip for local businesses, Morton demonstrated the problem to Craig Murray, owner of the exclusive Nimmo Bay fishing lodge. “I saw it plain as day,” recalls Murray. “Wild juvenile baby fry [salmon] coated with between 30 and 40 sea lice per fish on every fish that was brought into that boat.”
While Morton filed a law suit against a salmon farm and the DFO for allegedly releasing sea lice into the wild habitat, Murray shared his new education with Nimmo Bay regular and television producer David Kelley. Morton’s case, thought Kelley, would be perfect for an episode on his show, Boston Legal. “Finding Nimmo,” which aired last year, cast William Shatner and James Spader as fly-fishing enthusiasts taking up Morton’s legal fight against fish farms and brought instant public awareness to the issue.
“That had more impact than anything I had done to date,” says Morton. “The provincial government called me in the next week to meet with them, and normally it’s very hard to get meetings with these people.”
In real life her case didn’t fare as well as it did on TV. Because her suit implicated a government agency, the attorney general appointed a special prosecutor to take it over. Last summer he ruled that sea lice hopping from salmon farms to wild salmon didn’t qualify as an illegal release, because according to the law “release” refers to the introduction of a species into a foreign habitat.
But his ruling offered a glimmer of hope. His dismissal affirmed Morton’s research on the impact of sea lice, stating that “sea lice in the Broughton Archipelago are infecting and killing pink salmon.”
The power of one
After years of crying out as the lone voice in the wilderness, Morton had finally been heard. For the first time, the Canadian government had admitted in writing that salmon farms were harming the environment, setting the stage for a class action lawsuit on behalf of fishermen, fishing lodges, or any group that had been financially impacted by the harm done to wild salmon.
“That was a very powerful sentence,” says Morton. “What’s required now is for an interest group to pick this up and run with it. I personally don’t have a role in this because I’m not a commercial fisherman . . . but I’m ready to advise people who are thinking about taking the next step.”
Combined with the official study launched shortly after Morton’s post–Boston Legal meeting with the provincial government, the ruling has environmentalists cautiously optimistic. In the two decades that took her from orca researcher to salmon specialist, Morton may not have rid her home of the farms that drove her whales away, but for many she’s done something almost as important.
“If it weren’t for Alex there would be no public profile for this issue,” says Routledge. “She got it going. Because of her persistence, the public profile is getting much more pronounced.”
And as Morton sees it, when it comes to the future of wild salmon, that’s what really matters. “The public really holds all the cards,” she says. “When we talk about problems like this, we feel like we’re powerless, but we have all the power. If people stop eating farmed salmon, the problem goes away.”
Until then Morton remains in Echo Bay, seining the water for salmon, counting sea lice, and only occasionally slipping her hydrophone back into the water to listen for the whales she still misses. “Whales are my plumb line in life,” she says. “I have to always be heading toward them, remain where they are, or be looking for them. But it’s my dearest hope that someday I’ll watch the whales come back here and study how they do it. I’m absolutely certain that if these farms get removed, wild salmon will rebound and the whales will be back.
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