Every year, the fishing industry loses vast sums of money due to parasites, such as cod worms, growing in the flesh of fish. A stay in the digestive system of marine mammals is an essential part of the cod worm's life cycle. In the filleting factories, those parts of the fish infected with parasites are cut away. In certain coastal areas where seals abound, there are so many parasites that the fish halls refuse to buy the fish. How administrators will relate to the information that is gradually being made available about the interaction between fisheries and marine mammals will depend on the political objectives that have been drawn up for the management of these resources.
American legislation favours marine mammals.
Here, the nutritional requirements of marine mammals are taken into account first, before the size of the fishermen's quotas is established. In Norway, however, the seal hunt is maintained with the help of subsidies in order to retain the possibility of controlling the size of seal stocks for the sake of the fisheries. At the heart of every country's management system is the obligation to maintain healthy and abundant stocks of all species in the marine ecosystems. This obligation, however, does not prevent the Canadian government from deciding whether there should be 5 million or 3 million harp seals off the coast of Newfoundland. In Newfoundland, the ban on cod fishing is strictly enforced.