Okay. I'm sorry about that.
That creates a 42 kilometre by 63 kilometre exclusion zone. The pink dots represent the traps fished in 2013. The distribution of the traps over the sea bottom delineates the preferred snow crab habitat in area 12. As you can see, snow crab are not found everywhere in area 12.
The distribution of traps in 2021 is comparable to what it was in 2013. That is also the case for the fishery composed of 38 fishers who belong to our association in 2022. The 2022 data provided by those fishers was analyzed by Marcel Hébert, a biologist specializing in the snow crab stock in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. Mr. Hébert is now part of our team, having worked for 30 years in the snow crab scientific branch at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Moncton.
The next slides were produced by Mr. Hébert.
Here, you can compare the changes in area closings between 2021 and 2022 and observe that the fishing exclusion zone in 2022 covered virtually the entire preferred habitat of snow crab.
We will now look at the distribution of vertical ropes in the water between May 1 and May 7, between May 22 and May 28, and between June 24 and June 30.
A small blue circle represents 15 ropes in the water, a medium-sized circle contains 75 cables, and a large circle contains 150 ropes. We can see that during the seven days preceding the first area closing, our fishers were working in the preferred crab habitats.
Let's look at the May 28 map, which shows the distribution of ropes during the previous seven days. Note the large presence of ropes in the red striped rectangles, which close on May 28 and our fishers will have to leave within 48 hours.
Last, on the June 30 map, we see that fishing is now concentrated in two small sectors of area 12 and virtually the entire preferred habitat of snow crab is excluded from at least mid-June.
Does the preferred whale habitat coincide with these closures?
Do the whales observed justify the extent of these closures and excluding fishers from productive fishing grounds?
To understand this better, let's look at the changes in whale movements in area 12 in 2022.
To do that analysis, Mr. Hébert examined the changes in closures in area 12 between April 24 and May 7, between May 14 and May 28, and between June 16 and June 30.
The first closure took place on May 7 at the entrance to area 12.
On this map, we see the distribution of whales, the green dots, observed during the 15 days preceding May 28. We see that they are concentrated toward the centre of the area, where food is abundant. Note that the blue dot in the middle of the red striped rectangles does not represent a whale, it represents the position of an acoustic buoy that heard a whale singing somewhere within a radius of several kilometres. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is going to close nine rectangles surrounding that buoy in 48 hours, and our fishers will have to leave the site.
On that map, we see that during the 15 days preceding June 30, all of the whales observed were already concentrated in the centre of the area, in their preferred habitat, and that a very large number of rectangles stayed needlessly closed on the periphery, thus barring access by fishers to the preferred snow crab habitats.