Evidence of meeting #65 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 44th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was population.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Has that in any way damaged trade relationships with the United States in fish products or any other products?
Scientist Emeritus, Institute of Marine Research
No, not as far as I know, because we can't export any products from seals or whales to the U.S. As far as I know, it hasn't affected our export of other seafood products to that country.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Dr. Walters, do you think climate change may solve the problem for us? We've already heard that sea ice conditions, particularly on the east coast, are deteriorating, which of course has an impact on the seal population's ability to procreate. Is this something where, if we're considering reducing the size of the herd, we should also allow for the impact of climate change?
Professor Emeritus, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
It looks like the climate changes going on are actually favouring some of the main prey of the seals and sea lions on our coast. They haul out on rocks, so ice isn't an issue for them. The hake population, which is one of their main foods, is doing very well. Part of the herring decline and certainly part of the salmon decline we've seen do appear to be related to climate change factors and particularly to extreme temperature conditions and things like that.
That's the kind of thing that management can deal with by monitoring population size, by monitoring productivity and by adjusting the harvest from year to year. This is standard practice in fisheries. It's called feedback control or harvest control. They're management procedures.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
All right. Thank you.
Dr. Lane, our discussions and questions have focused on salmon on the west coast and cod on the east coast. Do you think we're missing something, though, by focusing on those two main species and not really getting a better picture of the total impact on all species, some of which, of course, complement the presence of cod in the east and salmon in the west? Do you think we really need to take an all-species approach to assessing what's going on with pinniped populations?
Professor, Maritime Seal Management Inc.
I have no doubt that there are bigger questions with respect to the impacts of seals on the ecosystem as a whole. Quite frankly, sir, we will never get to know that. The idea that we should spend our efforts trying to understand what those impacts are....
I'm not sure what kind of answer we're looking for—you as a committee or committees over the last 40 years. What do you need to know that will tell you and tell your clients—and I'm thinking about the cabinet table, I guess—enough to say we should move and do something? There's no doubt that those impacts are there. It's pretty clear, even from the aggregate level and the individual level. It's all there. We need to proceed, as Dr. Walters would say.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Thank you for that.
We have heard testimony that the health of the pinnipeds population, on the east coast particularly, is declining. I'm just wondering whether, if it's left alone, we'll get to a Darwinian kind of result where all species and all stocks will be basically clinging to survival if something doesn't happen.
Dr. Walters, can you comment on that?
Professor Emeritus, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
As I said, as these pinniped populations have built up in B.C., we've seen the standard mammalian density dependence in the survival rates of juvenile animals. They've dropped down and so on. However, we're also seeing a recent decline in the abundance of harbour seals. That's most likely associated with the continued growth in the transient killer whale population. Mother transient killer whales train their juveniles to hunt for mammals by taking them hunting for seal pups close to the shoreline. Other times they'd feed further offshore.
We'll see these continued changes going on. As said before, we can monitor them and we can respond to them. We've tried to develop computer simulation models that look at the whole ecosystem and all the possible interactions among multiple species. There are up to 60 different species of creatures at once in these models. The models do whatever you'd like them to do. There are just too many uncertainties that we will never be able to resolve by studying things piecewise in the field. We'll have to continue to manage adaptively into the future.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Mr. Hardie.
Mrs. Desbiens, you have the floor for six minutes.
Bloc
Caroline Desbiens Bloc Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
Mr. Chair, I may owe you two minutes because we came in a minute and a half late. I'm going to try to make my remarks very brief.
Dr. Haug, you stated that decisions are made based on measurements's, either the amount of pinnipeds or the amount of resources, particularly in Norway. Do these measurements come from the government, the field, Indigenous people and the folks out there doing the fishing?
Scientist Emeritus, Institute of Marine Research
Thank you for the question. If I understood it right, my answer is that all decisions on management are coming from the management authorities in Norway, but that's based on advice from institutes like mine, the Institute of Marine Research. We do the research and come up with advice on how the population should be managed. This is then decided by the Norwegian government, you could say.
Bloc
Caroline Desbiens Bloc Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
You're basically telling us that the government is taking into account scientists in the field and the various organizations that provide the measurements.
Are measurements taken often? Is it comparable to a country like Canada, for example?
Do you feel you do measurements more often than Canada?
Scientist Emeritus, Institute of Marine Research
I don't know how many measurements Canada does, but yes, measurements are primarily done by scientists. However, we also get some research measurements done by whalers, for instance, about blubber thickness, which we use in our evaluation of how these whales are doing in the ecosystem.
As I told you in my introduction, we saw that blubber thickness went down in both harp seals and minke whales in the period when the cod stock increased, but after the cod stock started to decrease, after 2015, we saw the opposite, in fact. Blubber is getting thicker in minke whales, for instance. We have also seen quite substantial decreases in pup production in some years in both of the harp seal populations we have in our areas.
It seems to be the rule that when harp seals get too little to eat, their blubber becomes thinner and the fertility of the females is reduced. Our Canadian colleagues have seen that if harp seals are not building up enough energy reserves in the form of blubber, they may lose their pups in so-called late-term abortions, which is a sign, you could say, that the seal population is large enough in comparison with the food available.
Bloc
Caroline Desbiens Bloc Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
Dr. Lane, you were quite clear in your comments and testimony about the principle of accountability, that the future of the resource, the future of the fisheries situation in Canada depends on the decisions that will be made.
You said it was too late for cod. In your view, if nothing is done right now to change things, are other species at risk?
Professor, Maritime Seal Management Inc.
Thank you for the question, Mrs. Desbiens.
Yes, I believe so. You said at a meeting last week, I believe, that four species in particular are on the brink of extinction. The evidence is there and it's attributable to seal overpopulation. That problem still exists. We must remember that seals are superpredators in the marine ecosystem, and they have very few natural predators. That's the problem.
Bloc
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you.
We'll now go to Mr. Bachrach for six minutes or less, please.
NDP
Taylor Bachrach NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee for allowing me to sit in the place of my colleague.
Thank you to the witnesses for your interesting testimony.
I recognize that I'm jumping into this study rather late in the game. I am familiar with some of the issues, obviously, as I represent northwest B.C. The health of our fisheries and this debate over marine mammal populations and their potential impact on fish are something to which many people are paying attention.
Perhaps I'll address my questions to Dr. Walters.
You began by stating that you feel there are twice as many seals and sea lions on the coast today as there have been in thousands of years. Because I've read elsewhere that there's a degree of uncertainty about the historical populations, I'm wondering what data this conclusion is based on.
Professor Emeritus, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
One of DFO's scientists, Peter Olesiuk—and I have repeated it—did a back calculation of how big the seal population had to have been back around 1880, right after the second smallpox outbreak really decimated first nations people. That's based on adding back into the population, backward over time, the known removals by commercial harvesting and culling. That calculation indicates that there were about half as many seals around in 1880—even after most of the first nations hunting had stopped—as there are today.
There's a lot of uncertainty in any back calculation like that. The data aren't that good, and we don't know exactly how productive the animals were. However, from that and from calculations based on the size of the aboriginal population in B.C., their likely consumption rates and the occurrence of bones from these animals in their middens and things like that, all indications are that they probably kept the populations down to well below half of what they are today.
NDP
Taylor Bachrach NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Dr. Walters, I came across a report from a technical workshop at UBC in May 2019. I imagine this was something you were involved in given your expertise. The summary of the workshop—the conclusions they reached in looking into this issue of pinnipeds and their impact on fish populations—was that the data are really insufficient.
We need better census data on the number of pinnipeds out there. We need better pinniped diet data. We need to know more about the potential impact of pinnipeds on salmon and about the fact that it depends on the proportion of seals and sea lions that are salmon specialists, something we're not terribly knowledgeable about. We need to do more to test the alternative hypothesis, which is that bottom-up effects of food supply and food web competition are primarily responsible for poor juvenile survival.
I'm certain that you're familiar with these conclusions from this workshop. What do you make of them and the direction they seem to be pointing in?
Professor Emeritus, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
That workshop mostly consisted of marine mammal researchers. The agenda was strongly biased towards people doing marine mammal studies, and they want more money to do more research. None of the studies they proposed would prove anything.
The idea of an experiment that I've promoted.... I would not have made that proposal if the data we could collect and have collected were sufficient to answer the questions or could ever be sufficient to answer the questions. The proof is in the pudding: We don't know what the responses would be.
For example, there's a hot topic in ecological research called the ecology of fear. That's studying how the presence of predators can affect the behaviour of their prey and make the prey hide, basically, more of the time, eat less and perform less well than they would if the predators weren't there. They've shown this in various experiments on a small scale. We have no idea at all how that ecology of fear is playing into the dynamics we're seeing out there, yet it certainly is a possibility.
I could list for you a dozen scientific things other than just going out to take more measurements like these clowns recommended. It wouldn't do any good at all; it wouldn't prove anything at all.
NDP
Taylor Bachrach NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Dr. Walters, are there examples from the past of when we've tried to control predators and have gotten it wrong and have had impacts on other parts of the food web that weren't predicted at the outset? What can we learn from those examples?
Professor Emeritus, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Yes, there's been a history in wolf control programs of not doing the control programs properly—not continuing to control long enough over time or killing the wrong wolves and not controlling the wolves that control the behaviour of wolves. Those have failed to produce, in some cases, reasonable results.
There's just not a lot of stuff where people have said that we need to treat what we're doing as an experiment, monitor it carefully and compare it to the alternative, as scientists would do in a control-impact comparison experiment.