Thank you for the question.
The relationship between the decimation of all of our stocks.... It's not because we're overharvesting. We're harvesting at a lower level than we've ever harvested most species. The only relationship we can see is through the pinniped population. That has exploded, and our fish stocks went down. I don't see how anybody can argue with that.
We decided we needed to find something else to do. I'm a big mackerel fisher, and have been all my life. I'm an advocate that we should be harvesting mackerel right now, yet here we are in a moratorium. I don't know how to further apply our answer to the question, to be honest with you.
Just to see the massive amount of stock of seals in our ocean, and in our bays right now with all the young. The population is going to increase again this year and we're going to harvest somewhere around 35,000 or 40,000 maybe. That's what it seems like, a modest harvest, and we should be harvesting 400,000. It's gotta be decimating our stocks.