Fisheries committee  Absolutely. Thank you, because I had to rush that at the end. What I was referring to was the design of the Yukon River Panel. Many people here have spoken about how it's been quite effective at bringing the United States and Canada together and bringing first nations and Alaskan native voices to the discussion.

Fisheries committee  Sure. I'm sure the other panellists here can also speak to this. The issue of bycatch primarily has to do with the pollock fishery, which is a large-scale trawling fishery in the Bering Sea that removes about three billion pounds of pollock per year. That's just the pollock. That's actually not counting the various other species that get caught up in the process.

Fisheries committee  I've never heard of seals identified on the Alaskan side. There has been discussions of beluga whales, which spend a lot of time down by the mouth of the Yukon and certainly eat salmon. My understanding is that they are not at the level that has been discussed on the Canadian coast, however.

Fisheries committee  Yes, absolutely. I think one of the most amazing facts about chinook that encapsulates just how important they are is that, if you do isotopic research into boreal forest tree species—spruce and other species that line the banks—you find the nitrogen isotopes that come from chinook salmon, because one of the major things they do in their life cycle is bring the nutrients of the Bering Sea thousands of kilometres inland to ecosystems that otherwise don't have access to them.

Fisheries committee  Thank you for this question. I think the two biggest threats.... It came up pretty much in everyone's testimony here today that one of them is climate change and what it's doing both in river and to the Bering Sea. Secondarily, they can have increased ecosystem pressures in the Bering Sea that are not directly related to climate change and have to do with large-scale fishing, which hurts salmon as bycatch but also is changing the food webs in the Bering Sea in other ways.

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's an honour to speak with you today. I'd like to start my brief remarks by framing who I am. I'm an environmental historian currently writing a book about the relationship between people and ecology along the Yukon watershed over the past two centuries, so salmon and the way salmon stocks have been managed clearly have a lot to do with this story.