Well, it's not just herring, Mr. Johns. As you probably know, there are many different species of forage fishes. Herring is without question the most abundant. With respect to our understanding of what we call the “dynamics”—what determines the abundance of herring recruitment in any one year—I think there are people working on that. We're even now talking about means to restore past herring spawning areas by moving spawn around to increase its distribution. There are others, like sand lance, and other species, like eulachon, and we're addressing that by changing the shoreline from cement and big logs. We're putting it back into a natural setting so that we restore the beach dynamics and all of the spawning for these forage fish. If we were to increase the number of forage fish, it's quite possible we could greatly reduce the seal predation of juvenile salmon in the Strait of Georgia. The preferred food of seals is not salmon, but they will eat salmon when they're present. They would far rather consume herring.
