Possibly, yes. Possibly.
You made a very good point, Mr. Sopuck, that I would like to expand upon. One example is that whether it's an aboriginal fish, recreational fish, or commercial fish, the quick response from most of us is, okay, we need to protect the fish that, as an example, Atlantic salmon eat, which are caplin, sand eels, and so on. Fine.
Another dynamic to healthy wild Atlantic salmon populations is the juvenile salmon heading out of the river in the spring, called smolt. There may be 10,000 or 20,000 out of a small river, there may be hundreds of thousands out of a river like the Miramichi. They all exit the river in a very short window of time.
If there is not predator cover...and the predator cover for wild Atlantic salmon smolt in the spring is healthy runs of alewives, herring, and shad that are coming into the river. We can't improve on nature, and nature has worked over the millennia to make sure that the young smolt going out of the river are going out at the exact same time that healthy runs of millions and millions of alewives and shad are coming in. The reason for that is so that the cormorants and the seals and the striped bass that are in the estuaries feeding at that time of the year are going to focus on the abundant prey species like herring and not so much on the smolt.
So it's not just the fish that support the fish in terms of food; what about the fish that support the fish in a healthy ecosystem?