Fisheries committee  Well, I'm not necessarily familiar with all of the criteria they use to do this, but I think they made a huge mistake in lumping U.S. and Canadian fisheries all into one red-listing measure. These are very different fisheries, pursued at very different times of the year, with ver

Fisheries committee  Yes, we do, and a lot of that is published in scientific papers. In the U.S., since 1996, they've had the Atlantic large whale take reduction team, which has been focused on trying to reduce the risks of gear entanglement for right whales in U.S. waters. They've done broad swee

Fisheries committee  There really is no difference between Canada and the U.S. in what causes serious injury and mortality in North Atlantic right whales. It's entanglement in rope and it's vessel strikes. There are a number of programs whereby both Canada and the U.S. are addressing it by using di

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Kelloway. I'm going to start with your last question first. How do our measures compare to the U.S.? The closures that Fisheries and Oceans Canada is putting in place in Canadian waters due to the presence of right whales is unprecedented. It is a solution that

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much, sir. I am a senior scientist at the Canadian Whale Institute and the Campobello whale rescue team that responds to entangled whales in the Canadian Maritimes and Quebec. I'm also a scientist emeritus at the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts. I s

Fisheries committee  No. There was a necropsy report that was published by the lead veterinarian from the University of Prince Edward Island. There were no whales that were found to have injuries from different human encounters. The two that were entangled did not have any sign of broken bones, and t

Fisheries committee  Yes. Of the 12 dead whales, they were able to do necropsies on seven of them. One was sampled at sea, so it was not conclusive, but they did bring all those carcasses, seven carcasses, ashore—

Fisheries committee  Yes, and they were able to.... The details, the diagnosis for each whale, are all available in the necropsy report.

Fisheries committee  If the entangling lines are recovered from the whale when it's either disentangled or during the necropsy on the beach, if there are sufficient identifying characteristics on the gear.... The gear is measured, and the diameter of the rope, and if there are any buoys present and t

Fisheries committee  Absolutely. Ghost gear removal is good for whales and it's also good for the fishery, because there aren't pots down there collecting lobsters or other target species that are not going to be brought to the surface, so absolutely, ghost gear removal is a good idea. It has been do

Fisheries committee  Yes. I think the working group came up with a good plan. There were corridors that were identified where vessels could go at normal operational speeds. They were surveyed and they were slowed down about 25% of the time, not due to sightings of whales but actually because two aeri

Fisheries committee  Those data are going to be looked at. We have data looked at, so we have sighting data for right whales correlated with depth for all over eastern Canada for all of our sightings of right whales. That question came up this summer, and it is going to be looked at in the last week

Fisheries committee  Most of the gear we take off entangled whales we find to be actively fishing gear when we are able to trace it back to the fishery that set that gear. Sometimes all we find is just a length of rope, in which case we can't trace it, but there are efforts to recover the gear and fi

Fisheries committee  That is a question that's going to be addressed at the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat at the end of November. We have data in our identification catalogue of right whales in the gulf and also in other areas, and we can compare that to depths, so we can actually attempt to

Fisheries committee  Well, we've come a heck of a long way. We took the lead, actually, in vessel strike mitigation 15 years ago. With respect to entanglements, this is not just a right whale problem; it is a global problem for many species. I think the commitment of the fishermen in the gulf is re