That's a tough one. I'll tell you, I've worked with scientists for many years. I participated in CAFSAC. I participated in the RAP sessions for decades. If I had been at those meetings this year, I would have been fairly aggressively arguing, why do we have these precautionary concepts? What are we really trying to do here?
If you were to introduce conservative measures at the start of a pulse and ask if we could spread this over four years, and then you were to slack back on the conservation, I would be a little more supportive of that approach. To be on the tail end of it.... I would have liked to see the numbers--what are we going to get from our productivity for the fishery out of this?
Some will say you have to keep these terminal-molt males around a long time for reproductive purposes. I mentioned earlier the reproductive strategies the stock has. Females can even have multiple clutches from one reproductive activity. The numbers in invertebrates, the number of larvae produced for.... The strategy is to make billions of them, with the idea that a small fraction will survive into the future.
In terms of this idea that we have to have every male hanging around for a long time to do the deed, I would love to have some good science that says yes, that's what we need. I was told of people who have seen videos of reproductive activity where multiple males competing can do quite a bit of damage trying to pull females from other males. These are real observations, versus this concept that maybe we need all the males.
The way it was, you'd make those points within the scientific RAP sessions. I wasn't there, so I really can't say whether or not I agree with them. But I would have argued those other points I made here.