Fisheries committee  It all depends on how much effort it takes the predators to prey upon their favourite food items. For many fish in the ocean, you are absolutely right. There will come a point when the search effort, the handling effort.... What's the point? For seals, there are salmon. Fine, it

Fisheries committee  Thank you. In terms of the factors responsible for the initial declines, I think it's fairly well established that habitat destruction and alteration were of key importance. It was the placing of dams, erosion, and land or river use issues. Number two was over-exploitation, bo

Fisheries committee  Right. It's the third-largest number of scientific publications on any fish. The first is rainbow trout. The second is zebra fish. There's a lot we know. We know a lot more than what we don't know. I think we need to use a lot of the science information that we have at present to

Fisheries committee  I think there are two ways to respond. In terms of doing a seal diet study, in principle it wouldn't take that long. In a couple of years you could have some information. The issue at hand, though, might be how many seal stomachs you would have to examine before you were able t

Fisheries committee  From a science perspective, I tend to try to simplify things as well as I can. It helps me think about things. As I said, there's a broad science consensus on the threats in fresh water and at sea. With respect to what's affecting Atlantic salmon, there are many things we can d

Fisheries committee  By and large, yes. It's probably not the only one, but it's clearly a key one.

Fisheries committee  Could I answer that in two ways?

Fisheries committee  In the first instance, I think predation is an issue. The key question is how the imbalance arose. Now that we have so few salmon smolts leaving the rivers.... One can almost think of this as a threshold, and that salmon must pass a certain numerical threshold before they get abo

Fisheries committee  Yes, I would think it a fair comment that as one goes further north, freshwater habitat issues are less of an issue.

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the members of the committee for this invitation to come and speak to you today. I won't say everything that I've provided in my brief to you because a lot of it is about basic elements of biology, but it's there for your interes