Fisheries committee  Let's get after DFO. The other part is trying to model this, saying, for instance, let's reduce the seal herd by 50%, or by x%, or by whatever percentage you want to choose. What are the costs of trying to reduce this population versus the benefits that would be achieved, and how long would it take to achieve these benefits?

Fisheries committee  We recently completed a major research project on seals in eastern Canada, and our data are current. The problem is synthesizing all of that information. We need money for that. That is part of the problem. But it also takes a lot of time to tabulate and harmonize all the information in order to assess the impact.

Fisheries committee  Are you asking me how much money we want and how much is being spent on research now? Including professionals, our current budget for eastern Canada is $200,000. We would like another $100,000 or even $200,000 to get an accurate picture of the situation.

Fisheries committee  We have spent a lot of money over the past two years. Fisheries and Oceans spent $5 million over two years to assess that. We updated our information on marine populations and distribution.We have already invested a lot of money and now we need a little more to pull it all together.

Fisheries committee  To a certain extent. We need more people trained in modelling. We need people with expertise in creating quantitative models and simulations to evaluate the impact.

Fisheries committee  Yes, they do, but not a lot. We found five, six or eight snow crab in the stomachs of harp seals around the Magdalen Islands. We kill one in 600 or 700 seals. Snow crab is a very small part of the seals' diet. A big part of the grey seal diet is the meat that fishers put in traps to attract cod and snow crab.

Fisheries committee  Thank you. The current challenge is not estimating how much fish seals consume. For example, a grey seal eats about a tonne and a half of fish per year. We even have a pretty good idea of the percentage each species' diet represents. We have a problem with the samples because it all depends on where we go.

Fisheries committee  The N70 is calculated more with the idea of protecting the resource, which in this case is the seals. That's where you're minimizing any sort of conservation risk. We do not apply this to grey seals right now. If we did, we would prevent the number of seals dropping below 70% times 250,000.

Fisheries committee  There is overlap. The problem is that cod are probably eating smaller sand lance, whereas the seals are eating big sand lance. When you start to try to quantify this impact, it gets more complicated than just the nice link that you're stating. Yes, there is overlap in diet, but the size composition of the diets for the two groups would be different.

Fisheries committee  Yes. The cod seems to be the best adapted species for the worm. The grey seal is the best of all the seal species as a host for the worm. The adults live in the seal, then the eggs are shed and they go through a couple of invertebrate hosts, they are eaten by fish, and at that stage they stay in a certain larval stage, and it's when they're eaten again that they mature into adults in the seal.

Fisheries committee  The way the framework works, it's 70% of the largest estimate ever seen, so the largest estimate that we've seen in the last 50 years is current, for sure.

Fisheries committee  My name's Mike Hammill. I'm with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and I'm a scientist working on the seals in Atlantic Canada. I did prepare a short presentation. I think it's been distributed to everybody. As you know, just to put you back into the framework, we've switched areas.

Fisheries committee  Harp seals, as you heard, reproduce in March. The grey seals start to reproduce just before Christmas and the mating season continues into about mid-February, depending on where you are. There has been a change in the population. Back in the 1970s, there were probably 20,000 grey seals in all of Atlantic Canada.