Fisheries committee  I'm not familiar with that study. I'm sorry.

Fisheries committee  Yes, of course there are. It is known that Pacific hake do eat salmon. I'm familiar with an ecosystem modelling study that investigated the potential interactions between the abundance of seals, the predation on hake and so on. If seals are reduced in abundance, could that lead to an increased abundance of Pacific hake?

Fisheries committee  We see an increase in local abundance of transient killer whales. The range is known to be very wide, so it could be just a localized response to increased harbour seal abundance. We do know that a favourite prey item in the Strait of Georgia is harbour seals, so there are a lot of observations of those predation events.

Fisheries committee  Yes, that's correct. Stock assessments suggest the fishing mortality rates were high, but the data are good enough. We have so much data that we can estimate the natural mortality rates as they vary from year to year. With northern cod, it appears that there's a consistent finding that in the natural mortality rate there was a really big spike.

Fisheries committee  Yes, that's an estimate, I think, for the entire east coast. Our study focused just on the localized population of grey seals in the area, I believe, where the Gulf of St. Lawrence cod southern stock is known to overwinter. We weren't using a big number. We were using a much smaller number.

Fisheries committee  Which work are you referring to? Is this the Gulf of St. Lawrence...?

Fisheries committee  This peer-reviewed published paper for the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences was separate from CSAS, and let's say that the harbour seal work was also separate from CSAS, although I did collaborate in a CSAS process on stock assessment of yelloweye rockfish, where we actually included pinniped predation from three different pinniped species inside the waters of the yelloweye rockfish.

Fisheries committee  Yes. Fraser River sockeye is a good example of that. Once every four years, there is a very large return. That's been consistently large, once every four years, since the 1940s or thereabouts, after the Hell's Gate fishway went in. That's been consistently strong in the order of approximately five million to 30 million salmon coming back.

Fisheries committee  Good afternoon. Thanks for inviting me as a witness. I'd like to start with a study on B.C. harbour seals. They've increased about tenfold in abundance since the 1970s, and are at approximately 100,000 animals. Their dietary requirements are approximately two kilograms per day, leading to about 70,000 tonnes eaten per year.