Fisheries committee  Thank you very much. As he said, I will be providing a brief overview of status trends for Atlantic herring stocks, and I will also provide a little bit of an explanation on how status is defined in the department's precautionary approach framework. The first thing is that it'

Fisheries committee  Thank you for the question. There isn't a simple answer to it. There are a number of things that could come into play. One, of course, is continued fishing. The second is that in the last decade or so we have seen general warming in ocean conditions from the Gulf of Maine int

Fisheries committee  Thank you for the question. This is an area of active research within the department. We don't have a strong linkage with any particular potential causal agent at this point, other than to say that there are a number of things we're looking at.

Fisheries committee  The first one is increased predation. That is an area of active research. Others are changes in the ecosystem that may be caused by climate change or just a change in the community. None of these have been directly linked to herring production or to herring changes in abundance.

Fisheries committee  They have not yet, to my knowledge. It is an area of active research.

Fisheries committee  The latest efforts have probably been for the last several years. It's been off and on for.... It's a general question within fisheries science. To my knowledge, the specific issue with herring probably has been just the last couple of years, but I don't have an intimate knowled

Fisheries committee  If you were to ask a scientist, we would always say we would like to do more science and we can collect more data and we can do more analyses. That said, we are confident with the science work we have. In the northern gulf, we have acoustic surveys for herring, and we have catch

Fisheries committee  I'm from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth and I'm responsible for stocks within the Scotia-Fundy region, the maritimes region, so I don't have all the details for the work within the Quebec region and the northern gulf. That said, I know there are ongoing collab

Fisheries committee  As I stated earlier, I'm a fish guy and I'm from the Scotia-Fundy region, so I'm not sure of the details related to snow crab within the gulf. I'm certainly happy to take that question back and pass it on to our experts from that region.

Fisheries committee  There is not a simple answer to that; a number of factors can come into play. From a science perspective, we're confident in the design of the data sampling and the surveys. Speaking generally, not specific to the 4T case, having intermittent breaks in our sampling may lead to

Fisheries committee  Thank you for your question.

Fisheries committee  I don't really have, I think, a direct answer for that. The one thing I can add is that as a result of implementation of the new Bill C-68, major fish stock provisions, throughout the Atlantic zones—so within the four regions—science is undertaking work that is related to this, a

Fisheries committee  There are two aspects to that. It breaks down into two themes. Some of it relates to fieldwork, meaning field studies, mainly targeting.... It's very difficult to determine what eats what in real time in the ocean, so there are a few techniques that one can use. If we are linki

Fisheries committee  To date, science has not identified a single issue that would explain that result. There are a number of things that come into play. There is continued harvest, so there are continued removals both in the commercial fishery and in the bait fishery. Then there's a second aspec

Fisheries committee  Right now, in the southern gulf, we have an acoustic index. We have a catch rate series, meaning catch per unit effort, and we have some gillnet information. By and large, from a science perspective, we have a fairly robust picture of current status. Trends are a little more di