Thank you. Actually, I wanted to speak towards this earlier. This is a very important question.
This is my opinion based on everything I know around this issue. When we talk about ocean bycatch, we are almost always talking about the pollock fishery and bycatch in the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea, and that there is very.... I trust the data. I do. I absolutely trust the data. They are monitoring. There are people observing the catch on those boats. I think we have a very good handle on how many of those fish are being caught. Those boats are targeting walleye pollock, Alaska pollock. It's a massive fishery. They're not targeting the bycatch. The fishing industry does not want to be catching salmon, I assure you. They've been doing a lot to avoid salmon.
That being said, the scale of the fishery is so large that you inevitably still catch some salmon despite all the technology. We can do better and we can move in time and space, and those things should be looked at, but inevitably there are some fish that are intercepted and bycaught. I just wanted to clarify that.
I do think it is really important. I also, on the record, do not think that the pollock bycatch is the cause of the decline of salmon in the Yukon. It's not, but it's certainly not helping. One of my bigger concerns—and I can send this paper, where we looked at essentially emulating a fishery of sorts that was selective on size, like the pollock bycatch fishery is—is that you can also be favouring the maturing of younger fish. You lose the old fish that spend lots of time in the ocean because of the extra mortality that comes from bycatch. There are things that are pushing all these fish to be smaller and younger, which we know has consequences. The ocean is increasingly dangerous, and the pollock bycatch is one of those dangers.