Thank you.
My name is Darrell Mullowney. Thanks for having me. I'll give you a broad-strokes overview of snow crab throughout Atlantic Canada, and then Mr. Hardy will follow suit with lobster.
Snow crab is a subarctic species. It's the colder species of the two that we're presenting here today. It's a bit of a fussy animal. It's typically found in temperatures ranging from about -1.5°C to about 4°C. That might correspond to depths of roughly 50 metres to 600 metres. It's a sexually dimorphic species, which means there are physically different attributes between the sexes. In this case, it means the males are the larger of the two sexes. It's a “male only” fishery where only the largest of males are retained. This is thought to be fairly safe in helping to safeguard the reproductive capacity of stock in the face of fisheries.
A central tenet of the biology of the species that's important to understand is that it undergoes a final, or terminal, molt. This need not occur just in the big animals; it can occur at small sizes as well, in particular the males who are of interest to the fishery. They terminally molt, or stop molting, at a carapace width that's somewhere between 40 millimetres and 160 millimetres.
This one genetic stock of animals spans four DFO regions. The stock extends from about central Labrador, in NAFO division 2H, all throughout Atlantic Canada down to kind of west of Halifax in southwest Nova Scotia, NAFO division 4X. Science tends to assess at broad spatial scales, but the management and quotas are allocated at much smaller scales, in crab management areas. With respect to removals of the species from Atlantic Canada, Atlantic Canada has been the biggest global supplier of snow crab for over two decades. The fishery really came on after the finfish collapses throughout the region in the early 1990s.
The southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, in NAFO division 4T, has the longest history of substantial fisheries. That's shown in the blue part; in the green part is the Grand Bank NAFO division 3NLO, which is off the southeast shores of Newfoundland. These are the two areas of primary consequence for removals. The stock removals have been something in the range of 80,000 tonnes to 100,000 tonnes for about two decades, with a pretty good bite out of that in 2018. Most of that was on the back of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Grand Bank. Looking forward to 2019, we're not expecting any major deviance from the 2018 situation in terms of removals.
We have a pretty robust monitoring and research program in all four regions. Looking at the bottom-right panel of the graph, we use what's called fishery-independent data to formulate biomass, essentially. These are sources of data that have nothing to do with the fisheries. We typically use surveys, either trawl or trap surveys. There are other sources of data, which are fishery-dependent. Those would be commercial logbooks—time and space, at-sea observer sampling, and those sorts of things. A big point we'd like to make is that much of the monitoring of snow crab in all regions is carried out in collaboration with industry. This includes fishery-dependent data, as well as such things as collaborative surveys with our industry and other stakeholders.
This graph looks at the exploitable biomass—the portion that I spoke of earlier, the big males in the population that we are able to fish on. Newfoundland and Labrador has been at its lowest level of biomass for the past four years. The terminal point on the graph is what the fishery has to look forward to in the forthcoming season. The southern Gulf of St. Lawrence is a bit of an opposite story. Their stock is fairly high in that region. The Maritimes and Quebec are the lesser two regions in terms of the importance of removals. Their stock is somewhere near its lowest observed level. So Newfoundland and Labrador is at its lowest observed level, the other two near it, and the southern gulf a little more promising at present.
I'll pass it over to Mr. Hardy to talk about lobster.