Evidence of meeting #114 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was whales.
A recording is available from Parliament.
October 30th, 2018 / 12:15 p.m.
Blaine Calkins Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Bain, you alluded in your comments to chum and coho also being species of interest to the southern resident killer whales. Is that correct?
12:15 p.m.
Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
Proportionally, their preference will be a chinook salmon, but they'll settle for chum and coho if they can't find the chinook. Would that be a correct statement?
12:15 p.m.
Chief Scientist, Orca Conservancy
It seems to be a seasonal thing. Most of the year they rely on chinook, but there are times that chinook densities are quite low. It seems that they eat a lot of coho in the Salish Sea in September, and then in October and November they take advantage of the chum run and eat a lot of chum, and then they go back to chinook for the rest of the year.
12:15 p.m.
Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
Okay.
I'm going to use your first names because some of the last names are a little bit long.
Lance, I'm sure you're aware, and Mr. Bain, I'm sure you're aware as well, of the concept of ocean ranching. In Japan and other countries that have used ocean ranching, some of it's been successful and some of it hasn't been. I'm wondering, as part of the long-term solution, if an ocean ranching approach to dealing with chinook salmon stocks might actually be part of the solution here, by making sure that there's enough food for all the competing interests. Would that help the southern resident killer whales in the long term, should they be able to survive that long?
12:20 p.m.
Chief Scientist, Orca Conservancy
I don't think ocean ranching's going to be a good solution. Chinook don't do very well in crowded conditions. Also, we've seen from the Atlantic salmon farming that there are a lot of environmental consequences to concentrating fish. Perhaps luring them inland would help meet human needs for fish, but I don't think ranching would be a good idea.
12:20 p.m.
Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
Are you saying that the southern resident killer whales differentiate between a hatchery coho and a wild coho?
12:20 p.m.
Chief Scientist, Orca Conservancy
Well, they'll eat what's available. With chinook, it's size that's the big difference. Historically we had chinook that were 150 pounds or 90 pounds, and a lot of the wild chinook now are down to around 30 pounds, with a lot of the hatchery fish returning at only five pounds. A five-pound fish is very different, ecologically, from what a 30-pound or 90-pound fish would be.
12:20 p.m.
Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
Nevertheless, the same genetics are used in the hatcheries from the rivers where they're reared. We don't take salmon from a different river and hatch them into a different system, do we?
12:20 p.m.
Chief Scientist, Orca Conservancy
Well, we select on them differently. The first fish back are the ones that get to reproduce. A hatchery chinook does not need to travel hundreds of miles up a river and does not need to defend a redd, so it can put a lot more into egg production and less into commuting. That means it can be a smaller fish that comes back early. It doesn't face the risk of predation that it would if it remained at sea for a couple more years. Chinook happen to be very plastic, and they change with changing conditions. The rules for surviving the hatchery life cycle are different from those of the wild-run cycle.
12:20 p.m.
Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
Okay. Thank you.
Mr. Barrett-Lennard, we've heard that the population of pinnipeds has exploded tenfold on the Pacific coast. When did that explosion actually occur? What would the historical, typical numbers of pinnipeds on the Pacific coast be?
12:20 p.m.
Director, Marine Mammal Research Program, Coastal Ocean Research Institute
According to the Fisheries and Oceans marine mammal group on Vancouver Island, who are the keepers of this kind of information and have been doing wonderful studies on pinnipeds over the years, the harbour seal populations have rebounded now to something like historic levels throughout the province. After a long series of culls, harbour seal populations have levelled off, and in fact have come down slightly, so the recent news about exploding seal populations is simply wrong. That explosion has taken place; it's over now. Sea lion populations are still increasing at a slow rate.
12:20 p.m.
Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
Thank you all for coming, and thank you for your passion on this issue.
12:20 p.m.
Mr. Ken McDonald (Avalon, Lib.)
Thank you, Mr. Calkins.
We'll now return to the government side and Mr. Fraser.
12:20 p.m.
Colin Fraser West Nova, Lib.
Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for being here with us today. Your testimony has been very interesting.
I have a few questions for you.
I'll start with you, Dr. Brown.
Mr. Michaud, you may answer my question if you wish.
The question is regarding fishing gear in the water being a problem. I'm from western Nova Scotia, so I'm familiar with the issue off southwestern Nova Scotia and in the Bay of Fundy. I'm wondering if you can expand a little bit on your comments about fishing gear being a problem and allude to whether that's “ghost gear” or current fishing gear being left in the water. What is the principal cause of the gear being in the water?
12:25 p.m.
Senior Scientist, Canadian Whale Institute
Most of the gear we take off entangled whales we find to be actively fishing gear when we are able to trace it back to the fishery that set that gear. Sometimes all we find is just a length of rope, in which case we can't trace it, but there are efforts to recover the gear and find out where it was deployed and if it was actively fished or not. Actively fishing gear is definitely a problem.
Ghost gear is as well. In the case of one whale that was entangled in the Gulf of St. Lawrence this year, the fisherman captaining the boat we were on said that the kind of gear found on the whale hadn't been used for a couple of decades. It is part of the problem, but actively fishing gear is the primary part of the problem.
12:25 p.m.
Scientific Director, Research and Education group on Marine Mammals
One of the challenges we have is the small proportion of the entanglements that are effectively reported. The current state of the situation with fishermen and entangled whales is likely to push some of the fishermen to under-report those cases. We're facing a very challenging situation in which we need the fishermen to report and to learn more, they need us to develop strategies, and we need enforcement to find solutions, so it's kind of a can of worms. We cannot stress enough that consultation and close collaboration with fishermen are probably the only ways we will ever get a clear portrait of the situation.
The work that Dr. Brown has been doing with her colleagues over the past years is very important. I would just remind people that she is working with a group of actual fishermen. Getting closer to the fishermen is probably getting us closer to a solution.
12:25 p.m.
West Nova, Lib.
I agree. Thank you very much for those comments.
Mr. Barrett-Lennard, I'd like to ask you a question. You talked about propeller strikes by boats. I wonder if you could help us understand which boats are the principal cause of boat strikes on whales on the Pacific Coast.
12:25 p.m.
Director, Marine Mammal Research Program, Coastal Ocean Research Institute
Yes, certainly. The propeller wounds that we see on northern resident killer whales, as I mentioned, are consistent with medium-sized vessels. These could be vessels potentially engaged in whale-watching. They could be utility vessels. There's a lot of boat traffic in that area associated with commercial fishing and fish farming.
I didn't mention this, but we also see evidence of blunt force trauma. These are the kinds of injuries that a whale sustains when it's hit by a larger ship. There have certainly been several southern resident killer whales that have died from blunt force trauma, which, we believe, has been associated with ship strikes, and some northerns have as well. Humpback whales and fin whales are also affected, so ship strikes are a bigger problem, I think. This is the take-home message that we realized some years ago.
12:25 p.m.
West Nova, Lib.
Thank you for that.
Mr. Bain, you mentioned that ocean warming in that area of the Pacific is a particular concern. I'd like you to expand on how that impacts on the chinook or the whale populations and what we're actually seeing with the temperatures in the water in that area.
12:25 p.m.
Chief Scientist, Orca Conservancy
I think what happens is that the chinook have parasites and pathogens that they co-evolve with. It's like how if you leave your fish in the refrigerator, it will stay fresh until you're ready to eat it, but if you leave it out where it's warm, then those pathogens start growing faster than the chinook are prepared for and they can debilitate the chinook or kill them before they get back to the spawning grounds. If they kill them at sea, that means they're not available for whales to eat.
We've seen what's known as the blob. It's a very large patch of warm water off the Pacific coast of the U.S. and Canada. In the years when that's been present, salmon survivorship at sea has been very low. That's something we weren't aware was happening in previous years. It's something that may become a lot more common.
We've also had a lot of natural cycles like El Niño and Pacific decadal oscillation, which are known to have impacts on salmon survival. We can go back to tree rings from hundreds of years ago to detect whether salmon returned to the streams near those trees. They suggest salmon populations have fluctuated naturally by, say, a factor of two just due to natural conditions.
What we need to be careful about is that people are going to start seeing a lot more bad years relative to the number of good years than we have in the past.
12:30 p.m.
Mr. Ken McDonald (Avalon, Lib.)
Thank you, Mr. Bain.
Thank you, Mr. Fraser. We went a bit over time on that one.
Now we go to the Conservative Party. Mr. Sopuck, go ahead, please, for five minutes.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
Robert Sopuck Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
Thanks.
My main concern is the seal issue. I think what I'm seeing here is kind of an orgy of political correctness and an unwillingness to.... That's not just to our visitors and guests; it's fairly ubiquitous.
It seems to me that's the elephant in the room, and I didn't mean the elephant seal in the room. I'm going to quote a study that was done in British Columbia by Peter Olesiuk.
He talked about the Puntledge River on Vancouver Island, where three dozen seals—that's 36 seals—killed 10,000 adult chum salmon in the fall spawning run. He was quoted as saying, “They take 60 to 70 chum fry per minute, per seal.”
Twenty or 25 years ago, the harbour seal population off the west coast was some 10,000 individuals when there was an active cull going on. Now it's at 105,000. As a biologist myself, I know we always want to say we need more data and we need more information, but at some point, given how critical the status of the chinook salmon is in some of the salmon runs and given some of the southern killer whale populations, this at least needs to be tried. I'm a big fan of adaptive management. You try something, and if it doesn't work, chances are the situation will revert to the original condition.
The seals have exploded both on the east coast and the west coast to levels we've never seen before. It's not just a coincidence that the Atlantic salmon haven't recovered and the cod haven't recovered, and now we're seeing these issues on the west coast.
Mr. Bain, I'd like you to comment on the seal issue and why we're not tackling it head-on.
12:30 p.m.
Chief Scientist, Orca Conservancy
There are two aspects to the seal issue. The kinds of seals you're talking about are targeting specific runs and taking a high proportion. That's actually a small percentage of the seal population. If you addressed those seals, you would protect those runs, but it would not make a huge difference to overall abundance. A lot of the other seals are eating different things, including predatory fish that eat salmon. It's unclear how those seals do. We could go back to culling and knock the seal population back down, but then we'd be back here talking about the endangered transient population.
If we want to get an ecosystem back in balance, I would recommend harassment of seals that are taking advantage of artificial conditions such as the one you just cited, and allow the transients to increase in number and reduce the pen-fed population in the long term.