I think so. As I said, there's not a conservation issue with respect to them. These aren't endangered species in the case of harp seals or grey seals. They're actually species that have reached historic population levels.
Earlier Mr. Stehfest talked about the range of diet and the items found. I think he said 57. It's very comparable to harp seals and grey seals. The difference is that we may be reaching a carrying capacity with respect to both of our species. Somebody talked earlier about how they're shifting diets and shifting range. Grey seals are expanding from traditionally Sable Island and are now populating the Northumberland Strait, the islands and down to southwest Nova, with colonies established in Newfoundland and Labrador, we were told, and also in the Cape Breton area. These new rookeries start up with a few animals, but they quickly grow to several thousand.
The numbers are the biggest difference. When we look at Norway or we look at somewhere else, with 7.6 million harp seals, whatever the impact is, 7.6 million multiplied by anything is fairly large. There's evidence of opportunistic feeding. Cod and capelin are our two key species. Capelin is the base of the food chain. Cod is an iconic historical harvest. Those two species are probably in what I call a “predator pit”—that's what Carl Walters would call it—where the populations may not have been knocked down by seals, but seals, I believe, are....
I tell you, I've worked on whales—you can see my pin here—and on whale bycatch and dolphin bycatch with the World Wildlife Fund in Mexico. I'm not going to go out and say let's go kill seals or kill whales and blame them for it, but at our population levels, I truly believe that our traditional fisheries are at risk and that these ecosystems are in the predator pit. Everything that comes up in terms of growth or new recruitment gets cropped off.