Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Bevan, for the deck. It's a pretty solid piece of business you have here. It's very informative.
I want to zero in on the relationship between some of the science efforts and the dramatic decreases in overall understanding of biomass.
The disconnect out there in the industry is a feeling that it's not actually plausible for biomass or stock estimates to decrease that much in one season. They're not disputing necessarily that there has been a reduction; what they're disputing is that it occurred in just one season, the inference being that the overall biomass—and I say biomass, but I'm generalizing it to various indices—or the true stock abundance levels were actually lower in previous years, but either it just wasn't picked up by science per se, or else the science did indeed indicate that information to managers, but the managers didn't pick up on it.
Could you comment to the committee on those kinds of reactions? Is what science is telling us always accurate, and are managers always acting on it?