The first three recommendations were about understanding better what the impacts are, but at the same time we documented impacts, I think that.... It's very difficult to go cause and effect. There's a great correlation between drownings in Canada and popsicle sales. The two aren't related, even though they're strongly correlated.
The thing that I found most interesting was the gap between DFO science that said.... About 50 other scientists looked at the data and verified that it was correct, but the data they were looking at was from stomach samples taken in late fall and early winter on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, in places like La Scie and St. Anthony and Wild Cove. If you sample seal stomachs there....
George Rose is a groundfish scientist and cod expert. I asked George to look at where the sampling was done and the time of year. Most of the seal population is 80 miles to 100 miles offshore from there. All the cod and capelin are 80 miles to 100 miles away from there in winter. Because of the Labrador current, they can't survive near shore, so you have a situation where seals, as was mentioned, are almost like.... They're not man-made structures, but there are areas of cod spawning, and the seals know those areas over evolutionary time. They show up at those areas. They may not feed on cod for six months of the year, but they may feed intensely during the spawning period, when the cod are vulnerable, the same way they'd be vulnerable if they were trapped by a fishway on the Columbia River.
The number of seals is what is striking on the east coast of Canada as compared with elsewhere in the world. There's a huge controversy in Australia over 100,000 animals. Every time we talk about 7.6 million, and the scientists from Norway talk about the impact on their coastal fisheries when the seals invade....
I apologize if I'm going on, but with the sheer number of grey seals, the size of the animals and their geographic expansion, and with the sheer population size of the harp seals, ideally it would be a harvest that would bring some balance to the ecosystem. It seems to be out of balance now. I do think there's a predator pit, as I mentioned earlier.
I'm sorry for running on.