During the winter period and when they're in pre-spawning and spawning aggregations, fish are aggregated really tightly together. One of the heartbreaking things about this reopening of the fishery is that if you go through the papers of fisheries science from the 1990s and 2000s, you can actually see the fish stock collapse. You can see that in the 1980s there are distributions along the shelf edge, and then sequentially, each year, the number of aggregations drops out until it links out to nothing. Multiple papers published in the 1990s and early 2000s show this sequential collapse, so it's quite shocking that we aren't considering the spatial distribution, because it is evidence. Some truly excellent fisheries science came out of the cod collapse.
There's another thing I want to comment on with the time I have. Our fisheries improvement project is a comprehensive improvement project, and we've been improving the data that's coming in from the recreational fishery, which is a problem. We have these great line cutters, which means that people can responsibly release leatherbacks and other bycatch to the best possible post-release survival. We have removed tons of old gear that was left on the wharves in southern Labrador as part of our fisheries improvement project.
It's a comprehensive project. It's not simply what the status of the stock is. It's all the components that will be needed to make a sustainable fishery.