I'll preface my remarks by saying the Committee for Atlantic Salmon Tomorrow has put in a huge amount of effort already, as you've pointed out, with private funds and interests to advance salmon conservation. The department is extremely appreciative of that and looks forward to continuing to work with CAST as an ongoing activity.
The specifics of the proposal that you mentioned you've described quite accurately. The proposal is to bring smolts in out of the wild, capture them, and rear them for about 18 months. The logic is that when you put them back into the water in the wild, they'll be faster, stronger, more able to go to sea, and survive longer. Then they'll come back, spawn, and ultimately increase the numbers. That's the theory.
The practice is not yet proven. We don't have any experimental data to suggest that will work. We have a number of concerns. We are always concerned about fish going back to sea and their fitness for survival.
One of the points we've raised with CAST, and with others, is that when you take animals out of the wild and rear them in a hatchery, we think—but do not know for sure—that affects their fitness. By fitness we mean their ability to forage, thrive, and feed.
If you're a captive animal for 18 months, you're being fed and your diet is changing. Instead of feeding in the wild exclusively on fish, you're feeding on man-made feed, so the composition of your feed is changing. We know that certain behavioural changes occur while in captivity. We think there are slight genetic alterations that occur, as well.
When you put those fish back into the wild, they're not the same animal that came out of the water 18 months before. Our concern is to make sure that whatever goes back into the wild is not going to pose any risks whatsoever for existing wild salmon.
The comments and concerns we voiced back to the consortium that was advancing this project were along those lines. We said that before we proceed with a full-scale project of reintroduction, we would like to understand better what those risks are and how to make sure we can mitigate them to the extent they exist. We would like to conduct a smaller-scale experimental design, rather than going for a full-fledged reintroduction program.
Initially we refused the request to collect 5,000 smolts out of the wild with the idea of putting them back in. We have now approved a different proposal with a different experimental design that I could take you into, if you like. We are working with CAST scientists to figure out the experimental methodology going forward. We will wait and allow the experiment to run its course, because what's critical, as Kevin has mentioned, is the future of the species. We don't want to do anything at all that we think would put it at further risk than it already is.