Fisheries committee  Thank you very much.

Fisheries committee  What I would like to add is that it seems to me there should be more involvement from the lobster biologists in DFO. They should come out and say what they know about the biological conservation of stocks—something that didn't happen in Newfoundland and in some other situations—a

Fisheries committee  I'll start right at the beginning. The biology of the lobsters is that they're cold-blooded organisms—poikilotherms—and that they feed and grow based on the temperature they're living in. If the water is warmer, they move around more, they eat more, and so forth. The fishery in

Fisheries committee  Basically, activity doubles for every 10 centigrade degrees, so if the temperature in, say, December is 5° and in St. Marys Bay in the fall it's 15° or higher, then you'll get a doubling of movement and a doubling of catch. Particularly in a situation in which you put a few lobst

Fisheries committee  It's probably 75-25. It's more important to preserve those females and to look after them, really, than to focus on the marketing. The other problem is soft-shell lobster. Number one, they don't taste that good. Number two, they get killed very easily in the traps with other lo

Fisheries committee  Strange things are happening—good old computers.

Fisheries committee  No.

Fisheries committee  Basically, two considerations went into the original season choices. One was the biology of the lobsters. The idea was to keep as many females protected as possible that were going to be carrying eggs, and to protect soft-shell lobsters. The second consideration was in relation t

Fisheries committee  You have to realize that Maine is a little bit of a special case. What happens in lobster biology is there are what are called “recruitment cells”. The recruitment cells are the current systems that run along the coastline. In the Maine area, the recruitment cell is what I call a

Fisheries committee  Yes, that's the whole reason that seasons were created in the first place. Oceanographic situations in, say, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence are different from what they are in southwest Nova Scotia in St. Marys Bay. The differences drive the life history of the lobster in each of t

Fisheries committee  Ms. Gill, the reproduction of lobster is pretty much dependent on what happens to the females. The females are quite sensitive to factors in the environment and are also slower growing and reproduce less often than most other species. Female lobsters only reproduce every second

Fisheries committee  Okay, we have a problem. I'm not getting the interpretation. How can that be fixed?

Fisheries committee  Yes.

Fisheries committee  I don't have that on my Zoom screen anywhere.

Fisheries committee  That is correct. Everybody would suffer.