Harp seals, as you heard, reproduce in March. The grey seals start to reproduce just before Christmas and the mating season continues into about mid-February, depending on where you are.
There has been a change in the population. Back in the 1970s, there were probably 20,000 grey seals in all of Atlantic Canada. Today the population has increased to about 250,000 or 260,000, and the largest concentration is found around Sable Island on the Scotian Shelf. Probably about two-thirds of the population is on the Scotian Shelf and one-third in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It varies because animals do migrate in and out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Some animals from Sable Island will move into the gulf to spend the summer and then they'll return to the Scotian Shelf to spend the fall and winter.
There are different ways to look at the diet of the grey seals. One way is to look at stomach contents or fecal contents. That's where you look at the otolith or the hard parts you can find in these different samples. You use these to reconstruct the diet and it gives you an idea of how much fish of different species are in the diet.
Another way is to look at fatty acids, the idea being that you are what you eat, so if an animal consumes a fish, the fatty acid profile will reflect the fatty acid profile of the fish. We see that things like cod are very low in proportion as a component of the diet. The diet is dominated by species such as sand lance in particular and also redfish.
All these samples were taken from the Sable Island area, so they reflect what the seals are eating within about a 100-mile area around there.
There is another study by Bowen and Harrison, and it is based on the fecal analysis approach. In some samples at some times of the year you can see that the proportion of cod really does jump. It can be as high as 40% in some samples--for example, in a sample collected in October 1997. It also varies down to less than 10%.
One of the problems in trying to allocate or evaluate diet is that you get large fluctuations depending on what animal you may have sampled and where that particular animal has been feeding. You get a big jumping around. This is different from what it would be from the fatty acid, which reflects what has been incorporated in the diet over a long period of time.
The idea behind that information is that cod is not a major component in the diet of grey seals on the Scotian Shelf.
Switching subjects a little bit and moving on to the management approach for seals in Atlantic Canada, we use what is called an objective-based fisheries management approach. This is based on the idea of a precautionary approach, where you identify targets and conservation measures to try to make sure the population stays above certain levels to avoid running into an endangered species situation.
There are two schemes in this. The first is data rich. This is what we apply to our harp seal hunt, and the idea is to make sure the population of harp seals stays above 4.08 million animals in eastern Canada.
For grey seals, our information is not as good. We're almost there. We need to do a couple of more surveys, a little bit more work, and then we can shift them over to what we would call a data-rich category. For now they fit into what is called a data-poor category, and that means that if we're trying to set quotas for harvesting we set very conservative quotas that allow the population to continue to increase.
The quotas currently are 2,100 animals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and 8,300 animals on the Scotian Shelf, but hunters are not allowed to hunt at Sable Island. The harvest in 2006 was close to 1,800 animals. The harvest is quite small compared to the available quota.
This winter we intend to carry out another survey, also with the help of hunters, getting new samples on things like reproductive rates. After this survey we hope we can move the grey seal into the data-rich category, which means we can probably increase the quota and accept a greater level of risk as far as our decision on harvesting goes.
The last two slides I have are extra. One is just to show you the idea of the objective-based fishery management approach and the idea of reference points. When we get into a data-rich situation, this is the framework we follow. The idea is to keep that population of animals above the 70% maximum mark. If it falls below the 70% maximum, then you would adopt more conservation-minded quota recommendations.
The last slide shows the general area where the grey seals are found, mainly based on the pupping areas. The major pupping area is Sable Island. Around 50,000 to 60,000 pups are born there, according to the last survey, which was done in 2004. The remaining animals are born in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the ice when there is some, or on the small islands in the southern gulf, and also on some islands along the east coast of Cape Breton Island, down to roughly Ecum Secum in Nova Scotia.
Thank you very much.