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The surviving fish will remain in the pens, where they will be fed and raised until their planned harvest in the latter half of the year, Boschman said.

The kill left the company with about 1,000 tonnes of dead fish to dispose of. Much of the organic waste from the company goes to composting companies on the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island, where it is mixed with wood waste and turned into soil, Boschman said.

“It’s kind of a beautiful way of solving two problems — wood waste from the forestry industry and mortalities from the salmon farming industry — and it creates a product that people really can’t get enough of,” he said.

Animal rendering and oil disposal company West Coast Reduction will take some of the remaining waste, he added.

Large Heterosigma algae blooms have appeared annually in the region for most of the last 20 years, but they have been absent during the last three, said Svetlana Esenkulova, with the Pacific Salmon Foundation.

The blooms typically last only a couple of days, but they can be persistent and stick around for several weeks, she said. Instances of the harmful Heterosigma blooms are believed to be increasing due to climate change, but neither the blooms nor fish affected by them are harmful to people, she said.

Esenkulova said she personally believes that wild salmon could also be killed by Heterosigma blooms.

Kristi Miller-Saunders, a head of molecular genetics at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, said it is difficult to understand the impacts of something like the algae in question in wild salmon because their mortality is not observed.