So you’ve got 500,000 or so grey seals knocking back close to a billion pounds of fish on the Eastern Scotian Shelf and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence each year and fishermen think it's a problem. For 20 years, they’ve been arguing that grey seals are the major cause of the lack of recovery of groundfish species like cod, and also contributed to its collapse in the early 1990s. Fisheries scientists have mostly resisted this sensible, common sense conclusion, even though the Eastern Scotian Shelf cod fishery has been shut down since 1993 and the stock still isn’t coming back.
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So this week , Jim Meek is the resident seal/cod expert .I am not a marine biologist (neither is Mr Meek as far as I know)butfor eons seals and cod have co-existed. To take over -fishing out of the equation is ridiculous. This article should stir up plenty of people on either side of the debate and perhaps sell one or two extra newspapers if indeed anyone takes Mr Meek serious. We should not blame the fishermen for over fishing anymore than we should carry out a senseless seal slaughter. The fact to consider is that any population being harvested will only take so much pressure and its collapses.
It may well be that there was simply too many boats on the water. And hasthe seal population really spiked or is the census biased? I could be wrong but I doubt it.....