An invaluable ecosystem

With an area of 250,000 square kilometres, over 35 commercially harvested marine species and a great variety of fish in its rivers and estuaries, the Gulf of St. Lawrence constitutes one of the world's largest enclosed seas, a highly productive ecosystem, and a major arena of commercial fishing in Atlantic Canada.

Owing to the abundance of its marine resources, the Gulf of St. Lawrence has always attracted fishers. Fishing was the main livelihood of many of the Europeans who came to settle on Canada's eastern coast in the seventeenth century, and today, as ever, there are still many coastal communities that live mainly from commercial fisheries. The richness of the environment is the result of a combination of factors which make the Gulf of St. Lawrence a unique, diversified ecosystem. It is in effect an enclosed sea, receiving as it does a substantial inflow of fresh water, more fresh water, in fact, than pours into the ocean from the entire east coast of the United States. The currents resulting from the meeting of fresh and salt water create a wide variety of temperature and salinity conditions, which affect all the marine species to varying degrees.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada's Gulf Region consists mainly of the waters of the Magdalen Shelf, including all the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence adjacent to the eastern coast of New Brunswick, the Northumberland Strait coast of Nova Scotia and western Cape Breton Island, as well as the whole of Prince Edward Island. These waters are shallow in many places (the mean depth is under 80 metres), and due to the heating by the sun, constitute the warmest ocean area of eastern Canada. While in the winter it is entirely covered with ice, in summer the temperature of the surface water may be between 16^oC and 20^oC, and may be as high as 25^oC in the shallower bays. This combination of factors fosters the proliferation of nutrients, and consequently the Gulf Region contains a more abundant marine life biomass than any other area of Canadian waters.

Fish, molluscs and crustaceans

Thanks to the wide range of water temperature, many aquatic species are to be found in the Gulf Region. Lobster, snow crab, scallop, oyster, herring, cod, American plaice, white hake, Atlantic halibut, mackerel and many other species are common there. A number of anadromous species, including the Atlantic salmon, smelt and gaspereau, spawn in the rivers of the region, three of which - the Miramichi, the Restigouche and the Margaree - are among the most highly regarded salmon rivers in Canada.

Birds and marine mammals

The region also possesses substantial colonies of shorebirds. Over 70 per cent of all Atlantic Canada's piping plovers - a threatened species - nest there. The Gulf Region also harbours the bulk (over 25,000 pairs) of the North American gannet population. Geese, sea ducks and shore birds stop over along the coasts in the spring and fall. Several species of seal bear their young on the ice off the Magdalen Islands, to the east and north of Prince Edward Island, and along the western coast of Cape Breton Island. And lastly, some whales are common in Chaleur Bay and where the water is deeper.