Fisheries committee  I'll do my best. What I mean by the fact that the shrimp fishing areas are self-sustaining is that when the.... Let me go into the life cycle of the shrimp first and that might make things a little bit simpler. Basically the female carries some eggs, she releases her larvae, an

Fisheries committee  The measured mortality rate was on the order of 48% in some cases.

Fisheries committee  It was on the order of 14% to 18%.

Fisheries committee  Yes, it is in many ways. I made a presentation to the departmental management committee just prior to coming here. In the 1960s and 1970s there were approximately two million seals off of Newfoundland and Labrador. There are currently in the order of six million to seven millio

Fisheries committee  That's an extremely good question to which I have a very poor answer. The reality is that we don't know very much about how they interact together. In most of what I shall call the production models, in which we estimate the consumption rates of the species in the area, we stil

Fisheries committee  We have a number of predators in that system that are consuming these less abundant stocks and therefore they maintain their feeding rates despite the fact that the resource is actually in decline. They don't care; they just want to eat. In this particular case, in the case of s

Fisheries committee  If you were to reduce fishing mortality, the natural mortality rate or the total mortality rate would hopefully go down. The natural mortality rate would be unlikely to go down unless the predators also go down.

Fisheries committee  Right now the natural mortality rate seems to be very high and there seems to be poor recruitment coming in, so the combination of these two factors means that the stocks are likely to continue to decline.

Fisheries committee  Yes, unfortunately it is.

Fisheries committee  These are mostly harp seals. There has been a slight increase in the hoods, but we're looking at harps.

Fisheries committee  Yes. In fact, there are records that go back in excess of 1,000 years that show periodicity on the order of a cyclical pattern every 50 to 80 years. It's not a precise cycle, but it is a very reproducible cycle, and that's on top of the cycle associated with climate change.

Fisheries committee  The exploitation rates that we have been measuring, which are on the order of less than 20%—and they're generally on the order of 13% to 18%—are considerably less than the total mortality rates that we're measuring in these populations. So the changes that occurred in one stock,

Fisheries committee  Yes, they definitely are.

Fisheries committee  Climate change is part of the signal we see in the general warming trend in the North Atlantic. However, most of the environmental conditions that we have seen in the region are still within the range of observations that we have seen in the past. We have set a few records, that'

Fisheries committee  Yes.