How about some common sense Dr. Hutchings? New data from DFO suggests seals eat twice as many cod.
INGONISH — No one is sure yet whether grey seals are continuing to threaten recovery of the cod stocks in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, but the seals are there and the fish are not. And new data strongly suggests seals aren’t helping the cod. Seals, eating the softer belly meat and leaving the heads, could be consuming much more cod than figures indicate. Previous data suggested a male grey seal’s diet was up to 24 per cent adult cod. Hamill’s new data suggests adult cod could be up to 60 per cent of the male grey seal’s winter diet. That’s more than double the number that was available to the Senate committee when it recommended a cull. continued
Dr. Hutchings:“Instead of having cod being allowed to recover in the absence of fishing, we had cod basically kept at a very low level because of these fisheries. Even though they were described as small-scale fisheries, they were small in the sense that the absolute amount of cod was relatively low, but they were high in terms of the percentage of what was available to be taken.”
What a narrow minded notion, Dr.
The unregulated fishing community that you grant immunity to has over fished and flourished while the fishermen have been the ones believed to have stopped a recovery.
Time to regulate the seals utilizing a major cull though out the North Atlantic.