“I am very glad to hear that DFO is looking for viruses in your salmon. I hope that you get full reporting and suggest you follow up with them on their findings. I am tracking three European salmon viruses that make government very uncomfortable. Warnings from scientists in Norway urge us to contain them, halt their spread, or suffer the consequences. No one knows how these Atlantic salmon viruses will affect Pacific salmon, but we do know they are deadly to salmon. We are going to have to move fast to identify the source and turn off the leakage, because we know what viruses do, we use the word all the time, they go VIRAL.”

Alexandra Morton

A Canadian citizen since 1997, Morton has spent nearly three decades in coastal B.C., raising her children and devoting herself to the region’s ecosystem. It’s that dedication and conviction that earned her a People’s Order of British Columbia award last fall.

Morton is foremost an environmentalist – a Canadian-American marine biologist best known for her 30-year study of wild killer whales in the Broughton Archipelago. Since the 1990s, her work has shifted toward the study of the impact of salmon farming on Canadian wild salmon.

See earlier story on salmon in the Okanagan – testing by ONA and DFO