Fisheries committee  I can't think of anything in particular off the top of my head. Can any of my colleagues?

Fisheries committee  No, we don't know. Quite frankly, it's very difficult to say, as we mentioned. Small pelagic fish can be boom or bust; they can go up and down very quickly, in short timeframes. When they do go down, we're obviously concerned and we're looking very carefully and hoping the situat

Fisheries committee  It is very much so.

Fisheries committee  Yes, possibly it could. I can't recall any detailed studies in which they have looked at the impact of seal predation on capelin. Everything feeds on capelin. This is the challenge: to figure out which of its many predators are having the biggest impact on it. All the whales eat

Fisheries committee  The potential is certainly there with capelin having gone down. One year is not so much of an issue, but if they stay low for a couple of years, then you would expect to see some impact. If you look at our graphs, you can see how the increase in northern cod is not linear upwar

Fisheries committee  Yes. If we got into a very long period in which the stock didn't, say, go above 300,000 or 400,000 tonnes, we could be in for—I'm sure you've heard it mentioned—a regime shift in which the stock stabilizes at a much lower level than in the past. If that persisted for a long time,

Fisheries committee  I don't think you have to wait until 2019, because we do what's called interim stock updates. In the intervening years, we will do an update and there will be a science response report produced and placed on the CSAS website. In those updates, we don't do a full rerun of all the

Fisheries committee  Uncertainty is a word that you see used quite often in the assessment documents. As I mentioned in my presentation, we have a new assessment model, and one of the key things we have to address in a far better way than anything we've had in the past is the issue of uncertainty. I

Fisheries committee  We are seeing some things. We're not seeing as much rebuilding in some of the other groundfish resources within the northern cod stock area as we are with the cod. Things like American plaice within that area are improving, but they're not rebuilding quite as quickly as cod did.

Fisheries committee  I believe the last capelin assessment was in 2014. I stand to be corrected, but it might be done every second year.

Fisheries committee  I think the answer is that the seal population is close to an all-time high, so it's no surprise that you are seeing them even in the wintertime, especially in the estuaries where, as you say, there may be sea trout around. The science indicates that the growth we've seen in the

Fisheries committee  The key measure you're looking for is where this stock shows evidence of having suffered serious harm. To look for the evidence of serious harm, we looked at things like the age structure of the population and where the large fish are disappearing. We looked at how effective the

Fisheries committee  I have no comment.

Fisheries committee  The average sizes we are seeing in the fish catches have generally been increasing steadily in the past few years. I mentioned earlier how the age structure of the fish population is expanding every year. They are surviving to an older and older age, and we are seeing fish that a

Fisheries committee  Yes. They can live to be quite old. They will feed on crabs at a time when there are no other things around. They're certainly not their preferred prey. I'm sure they're quite crunchy to sink your teeth into, but we do get photographs sent to us because fishermen are obviously c