Thus, although we may become preoccupied with political 

 compromise, the wise management of renewable living resources 

 such as sea turtles clearly cannot ignore the basic biology of 

 the species in question. I repeat that the biological realities 

 cannot be compromised without risk of losing the resource for 

 everyone . 



In attempting to arrive at a reasonable management plan for 

 the recovery and controlled exploitation of sea turtles, we must 

 do the following: reduce natural mortality; reduce incidental 

 catch and regulate intentional take, which will require us to 

 conduct stock assessment and determine the sustainable yield. 

 That is, we must ask "how many are there?" and "how many can we 

 take?" Much of what you have heard at this symposium thus far 

 concerns various methods which have been proposed to bring about 

 one or more of these objectives. All of them constitute 

 management options that are available to us in our attempts to 

 accomplish these three tasks. In preparing to address these 

 tasks, two points become obvious after a little consideration. 

 First, management options depend upon the biology of the species 

 and second, management decisions are based upon population 

 models. 



The first of these is clear from what I have said before. 

 If management options are not derived from biological realities, 

 then all of our political compromises vanish in the wake of 

 resource depletion. The second statement may not be as clear. 

 Note that I have chosen my words very carefully here. I do not 

 say that management decisions should be based on population 

 models. I maintain that management decisions are based on 

 population models. They were based on population models in the 

 past, are now, and will continue to be in the future. 



For some of you, this may seem to be a strange thing for me 

 to say. Each of you probably has his or her own favorite 

 management scheme. You may be saying to yourselves right now, "I 

 don't base my management decisions on a population model." I'd 

 like to argue that all of us do base our management decisions on 

 population models, even if those models are hidden, tacit or 

 somewhat inexplicit. I'll use headstarting as an example of what 

 I am talking about, since the general idea is familiar to most of 

 you. Please note that I do not intend to single out headstarting 

 as being in any way especially wrong, misguided or inferior to 

 any other management scheme. I am simply using it to illustrate 

 a point. 



If one is an advocate of headstarting, then I maintain that 

 one bases management decisions on a population model, even though 

 the model may not have been developed intentionally as a model or 

 with the degree of explicitness that we usually associate with 

 mathematical demographic computer models. There are several 

 assumptions that are inherent in the underlying headstart model, 



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