A live sea louse such as the one anti-salmon farming activist Alexandra Morton alleged she recently found in packaged salmon from a Loblaws-owned supermarket in North Vancouver would be an extremely unusual occurrence, according to the BC Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA).

"It's highly unlikely that a sea louse on a fish would make it all the way from a farm to a package in a store," Shawn Hall, a spokesman for BCSFA, told IntraFish.

The fish that travel from BC salmon farms to area retailers are handled by people at least four times from the moment they leave the water to the time when they are packaged as fillets, Hall noted, making a stowaway louse's journey a tough one.

"This is the first allegation of this that we're aware of," he said of the incident reported by Morton.

There have been high levels of lice for farmers located along the west coast of Vancouver Island, Hall noted, and farmers in the affected area are taking action to mitigate those impacts. The industry has battled lice for years, and the parasite has continued to be an issue of contention between industry and salmon farming opponents.

Other major salmon producers confirmed with IntraFish that while it is feasible a sea louse could've remained attached to a salmon scale in a skin-on fillet, it would be nearly impossible for the louse to be alive, as it had likely endured over 24 hours of processing and travel before it arrived at the Loblaws Superstore.

Salmon are often stunned within seconds of being taken from a harvest vessel, where they are then bled out and instantly dropped into a freezing ice flurry, where most lice are instantly killed.

Morton told IntraFish the salmon was not a skin-on fillet and that she was not aware of where the salmon was produced, since it was not included on the product label for the fillet she found.

Aquaculture

BC producers: Live sea lice on retail salmon 'highly unlikely'