The impacts of the seals on the rockfish was brought up at the Mill Creek meeting several times and one of the gentlemen testifying questioned the math used by the State in the biology and assessment report (sorry I didn't catch his name but if he is a reader here- thank you).

Anyway I visited that report and found the relevant section (7.9.1) where the situation in the San Juan is discussed. When I did the math as reported at the Mill Creek meeting I got a different number than what is in the report (though in the past I have been accused of using fuzzy math!). There it is reported that there are 7,000 harbor seals in the Islands. Further that the average weight of those animals is 140 pounds. It was estimated that their daily ration (amount they eat each day) is 4% of their body weight. That means each seal can be expected to eat 5.6#/day (140 X 0.04 = 5.6). Since there are 7,000 animals that would mean the population is eating 39,200#s (7,000 x 5.6 = 39,200) of food/day or 14,308,000# of food/year; a figure that is somewhat larger than the 5 million pounds annually reported in the report.

In the report the authors reported that based on a recent study (Lance and Jefferies 2007) rockfish comprise 12% of the San Juan seal's annual diet. 12% of 14,308,000 equates to 1,716,960 pounds of rockfish. No matter how you slice it that has to be a lot of rockfish. While there is no mention of which rockfish are being eaten if I had to guess I would expect that a big portion would be Puget Sound rockfish.

One has to wonder if this consumption of rockfish represents a diet shift related to the crash of north Sound herring stocks (specificially the Cherry Point stock). If so it would be another example of the inter-connections in the ecosystem pointing out the need for a comprehensive holostic approach to recovery efforts.

Tight lines
Curt