Fisheries committee  Thank you, members of the committee, for allowing me to speak to you today concerning what science knows about striped bass and planned science activities moving forward. My name is Doug Bliss, and I am the director of the science branch for the gulf region of Fisheries and Oce

Fisheries committee  Mr. Finnigan, we use traditional techniques used throughout wildlife science to measure the fish, called “mark-recapture” techniques, which essentially involve tagging fish and recaptioning them at some location later, and from that you can infer their population. It's what is do

Fisheries committee  In terms of what happened in 2017, you can see a peak in the graph of our estimate of the average number of fish there. There were close to a million. Why the fish decided to “prospect”, as we call it, into further areas in the north in that particular year is unknown. It's exact

Fisheries committee  We didn't have time to put it in the deck today, but we have a long time series that shows—

Fisheries committee  We go back with air temperature, and we make reference to water temperature. We have air temperature records going back to the late 1800s.

Fisheries committee  There is an augmentation of average river temperature over time that is consistent and continuing.

Fisheries committee  Yes, we can.

Fisheries committee  For the population estimate, as you can see from the graph that's displayed of the most current population, the average population estimate is 333,000. The confidence ranges from 154,000 to 623,000.

Fisheries committee  We understand that an Atlantic seal advisory committee has been established to look at this question.

Fisheries committee  Yes, I can tackle that. A couple of things are clear. The question about warming waters and climate change came up. A lot of this is mixed in with the fact that the entire ecosystem is changing because of global change. The warming temperatures that we see—not only in the ocean,

Fisheries committee  One thing that we're doing, for example, is something called the Atlantic salmon research joint venture, which was started by the department. It's basically a coalition of the science community working on Atlantic salmon to study these kinds of issues. It's pretty clear that the

Fisheries committee  I'm sorry, sir. I don't have an answer to that question.

Fisheries committee  Are you talking about fishing practices or management practices?

Fisheries committee  What we do know about the States is that they have a completely different management regime. They have fisheries commissions of the various states. Actually, in our opinion, because we have a consistent approach in Canada and even in Quebec.... Because we work closely with our c

Fisheries committee  It's an open question.