Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to come and speak today. It is an honour and privilege to do so.
I'm here today to talk about the future of the fishery for northern cod. My name is Dr. Brett Favaro and I'm a research scientist at the Fisheries and Marine Institute of Memorial University. As a scientist, I build and test gear that is designed to produce the smallest possible impact on the environment while being safe and effective for fish harvesters to use.
I'd like to start today by acknowledging that this isn't just my story I'm about to tell, it's the story of my graduate students, my collaborators, and the many inshore fishermen who have played host to our research, especially Aubrey and Marie Payne from Fogo Island. I also acknowledge financial support from the Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador's Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture, and the Research and Development Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, as well the other organizations on my slide.
As you're all aware, the collapse of the northern cod represented one of the greatest environmental and economic tragedies in Canadian history. However, for the first time since the moratorium, there appear to be early signs of recovery. I'm not going to spend much time today talking about the health of the stock, because I'm certain that will be amply covered by the rest of my scientific colleagues who will be speaking today. What I want to talk about is how to conduct a fishery if and when it opens again.
The sustainability of any fishery depends in part on the technology you use to catch fish. And whether you use gillnets, longlines, trawls, or any other technique, there are going to be impacts on the environment, but not all gear is created equal. For example, gillnets are a sort of gear that have been widely used to catch fish in Newfoundland and Labrador and were used to land a major component of the cod catch prior to the moratorium.
There are problems with gillnets. For one, it's not just cod that they catch. When you put a gillnet in the water, it's quite likely you're going to catch a lot of things that you don't want to be catching, from seabirds to seals. There is a lot of marine life that can get caught in a gillnet. Second, if you lose a net at sea, you get a lot of ghost fishing, which means animals that are caught and killed by these nets when they're drifting around in the water. This is bad for fishermen and it's also bad for the environment. Third, and perhaps the most difficult for industry to cope with, is that by the time you haul back your gillnets, there's a good chance that the fish will have degraded substantially in quality.
From the moment a fish is ensnared in the gillnet, the clock starts ticking. They struggle in the nets, they're picked up by predators and scavengers under water, and they slowly die before you even get the chance to harvest them. This makes it very hard to ensure consistent quality in the fish being caught in the gear and there are economic consequences to this, which I'll explain in a moment.
This brings us to my story today. In the early 2000s, my colleague, Phillip Walsh, began an effort to introduce a gear known as pots to the community of Fogo Island as an alternative fishing gear to gillnets. Pots are baited traps that are set on the bottom of the sea and Canada has a long history of using pots in many fisheries. For example, in British Columbia, we use pots to catch spot prawns and sablefish; and in Newfoundland and Labrador we use pots to catch snow crabs.
Over the last few years we've discovered that pots are a great gear for catching cod as well. On this photo, you can see one of the original pot types, which we call a Newfoundland-style pot. It's quite large and heavy and was used by some Fogo Island fishermen for several years to catch cod. Now, the Newfoundland pot did work, but it was somewhat expensive to build and if your boat is very small, it can be a little unwieldy. Therefore, we pursued a project where we'd identify a pot that is so efficient that it makes clear economic and environmental sense for fishermen to use it as their primary gear, and if we couldn't have identified such a pot, we'd design and build one ourselves.
The slide shows one of the pots that we designed and built. Between the summers of 2015 and 2016 we tested five models of pot aboard industry vessels from Fogo Island, including lightweight Norwegian-style pots with various mesh sizes, and this pot you're looking at right now. Pots are a very practical fishing gear; to save space, they're collapsible. Here, you can see three pots stacked on top of each other on the back deck of a fishing boat. Notice the little doughnut-like floats on the top of the pot. When the pot goes in the water, these floats actually pull the roof of the pot upward which opens it up, so fish can swim inside.
When the pots are collapsed, they're quite compact. If you can believe it, you're looking at more than 30 pots of five different makes all stacked together in this small trailer. Here, you are looking at one of the lightweight Norwegian-style pots, but with a large mesh size that we added to make it easier for small fish to escape. This catch was pretty typical, about 30 fish with the length of, on average, about 60 centimetres. But the real advantage to this gear is not the quantity of fish, it's the quality. When fish are caught in pots, they're not killed by the pot. They're vibrant, healthy, and in great shape when you bring them aboard. This is why fish harvesters have been able to sell their pot-caught cod to fine restaurants at premium prices.
I contrast that with this photo of a gillnet-caught cod, which was taken by my graduate student, Phillip Meintzer, just last week in Labrador. Here you can see a cod that is beat up, damaged, and harmed by the capture process. This fish is not going to fetch you much money at the market.
While it's possible to get very high quality fish out of gillnets, if you leave them in the water for very short periods of time, in reality there are a million different reasons that a fisherman might leave the gillnets out there for longer than would be ideal. For example, if you have your net out and a storm unexpectedly rolls in, you may be unable to safely retrieve your gear during that same day. As a result, fish may be ensnared in nets for days at a time, and what you end up catching is damaged and worth very little.
Quality also depends on proper handling of the fish after they're caught. Here you can see us bleeding fish in icy water aboard the fishing boat. Here I'm showing you the bled and gutted fish being stored on ice for the trip back to the processor. This type of care is essential to ensure that you get as much economic bang for your buck out of every fish you take out of the water.
Now I'm going to show you a video that brings pots to life.
One aspect of my research is that I start nearly every project by attaching an underwater camera to fishing gear so we can better understand what actually goes on when the fishing gear is in the water. What you're looking at is our big experimental apparatus with the Norwegian-style pot on the inside of it. We're about to see video, looking from the top down onto this pot when it's underwater.
Now you're about 40 metres underwater, just off of Fogo Island. What you're seeing here is a few minutes after the pot was set in the water. It's hard to see because of the contrast, but you have some cod swimming around the pot, and you have one in the upper chamber of the pot right now. You can see that the entrances are on the left and right, so they're swimming around the bottom to try to find their way into the pot.
Now you're seeing about 20 hours after the pot was set. The pot has about 35 cod in it. You can see them swimming in that upper chamber. What actually happens is, whichever direction the water is moving, the fish will orient themselves and swim against the current while they're still in the pot. Again, these cod are still alive when they're in the pot, and they don't actually get killed until you bring them aboard.
In a moment we're going to see this pot get hauled up to the surface. These videos are very powerful because we can actually explore what's going on with this gear underwater.
Here's the fish being brought up to the surface. I've sped it up a bit, so this is actually at about double-speed. We're actually watching the gear come off the bottom and get hauled right back up to the surface to be brought aboard the boat.
This is the first instance when you're going to see the fish start to swim in a disturbed manner, where they swim more aggressively, presumably to try to find their way out of the pot. The videos have shown us that not very many actually manage to escape. When they get right up, near the surface, you can see some bubbles start to come out of the cod as well.
We repeated this many times in Fogo Island over the summer, and we were able to paint a really good picture of what a typical deployment of a pot looks like.
Now that we're underwater, I'm about to take you above the water.
Now we're flying over a fishing boat that's actually using a pot. If you look down here, this is one of the Newfoundland-style pots actually being hauled up and brought aboard the vessel. This just gives you a sense of what this looks like when you're actually fishing these out on the water. We have our fish down there in the water. This pot has a large cod end at the top where the fish accumulate.
This is the boom on the vessel. It's going to get swung out across, and it's going to get hauled out of the water.
I hope this gives you a sense of what potting looks like in real life. This summer we found that we could catch a vessel's entire weekly quota in a single day of fishing with 25 pots. The new, lightweight pots are cheap to buy, and easy and safe to use, and there is tremendous grassroots' support for this technique. We receive dozens of calls every week from fishermen across the province who are interested in this gear. Pots are scalable, meaning you can use them on big boats or small boats, and they certainly catch commercial quantities of fish. They can preserve the quality of fish that they catch so the fishermen can achieve higher market prices than fish caught with less sustainable methods. You can use biodegradable twine to provide an escape hatch on the pot, so if a fisherman loses one underwater, the pot doesn't continue to trap fish forever.
As a conservation biologist, I'm impressed by their reduced impact on seabirds and other large-bodied marine species, which would otherwise be greatly harmed by the widespread reintroduction of gillnets to Newfoundland and Labrador.
I want to wrap up by leaving you with two key messages. The first is that, from a conservation and economic perspective, any new cod fishery should be based on quality rather than quantity. We cannot create a system that forces fishermen to catch massive volumes of low quality product to make a living. It is inherently unsustainable and doesn't make sense economically. Our research suggests that pots could be a viable tool to be used at large scale in a quality-based fishery. When you're making decisions about how to manage the cod fishery, pots should be at the top of your mind.
My second piece of advice deals with the nature of the cod stock itself. I remind everyone that we're talking about a species that the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, or COSEWIC, has assessed as being endangered. Even if it seems like there are more cod in the water than there have been recently, there are still far fewer cod in the water than there were historically. Any new fishery absolutely must go slow. Just because there are more cod now than there were a decade ago doesn't mean it's okay to hammer the species with more fishing pressure than it can take.
COSEWIC's most recent assessment of Atlantic cod occurred in 2010, based on data going up to 2007. I think it would be tremendously helpful for COSEWIC to assess cod once again so that all levels of government, as well as industry, can be given a clear-eyed picture on the health and status of northern cod, and so that any decisions about it can be made using the best available peer-reviewed science to date.
Once again, my two key pieces of advice were first, to focus on quality in the cod fishery and to consider pots as a tool to achieve that; and second, to have COSEWIC conduct a scientific reassessment of the state of Atlantic cod, and for managers to thoroughly consider that assessment in any decisions made about the fishery.
I spoke to you today about the benefits of pots and there are many. I think this gear can provide an excellent pathway towards sustainability in a revitalized cod fishery. As a scientist, I also have a responsibility to end with a reminder that the best way to make fishing profitable is to make sure there are enough fish in the sea to go around.
Thank you very much.