year, and direct that the National Marine Fisheries Service 

 prepare a Conservation Plan for Steller sea lions by 31 December 

 1990. To effectively implement the statutorily mandated 

 quota, the National Marine Fisheries Service will have to 

 develop a system for obtaining and analyzing incidental catch 

 data necessary to determine when the quota has been reached, 

 and a mechanism to stop or regulate the involved fisheries in 

 time to insure that the quota is not exceeded. It also may 

 be necessary to allocate the quota among different fisheries 

 since some fisheries may take disproportionately large numbers 

 of Steller sea lions or occur later in the year than others. 

 Consequently, by letter of 6 December 1988, the Commission 

 suggested that the National Marine Fisheries Service work 

 with the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the State 

 of Alaska, affected fishermen, and other interested parties 

 to develop guidelines for quota allocations and a 

 reporting/monitoring program to provide the incidental take 

 data necessary to determine when quotas are reached. 



The Commission also pointed out in its letter that the 

 background information necessary to develop a Conservation 

 Plan for Steller sea lions was available in the report of the 

 Steller Sea Lion Workshop convened by the National Marine 

 Mammal Laboratory in December 1986 and in the Steller sea 

 lion species account published in the Commission's 1988 

 "Selected Marine Mammals of Alaska, Species Accounts with 

 Research and Management Recommendations." The Commission 

 therefore concluded that it should be possible to complete 

 the Steller sea lion Conservation Plan by mid-1989, well 

 before the 31 December 1990 deadline mandated by the statute. 



By the end of 1988, the Service had taken no further 

 action to designate the Steller sea lion as depleted under 

 the Marine Mammal Protection Act and had not advised the 

 Commission of steps it was taking to develop and begin 

 implementing a Conservation Plan as recommended by the 

 Commission. 



Proposed Increase in the Optimum Yield Range of the Groundfish 

 Fishery of the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands 



On 28 April 1988, the National Marine Fisheries Service 

 issued a "Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement 

 and Regulatory Impact Review/Initial Regulatory Flexibility 

 Analysis for a Proposal to Increase the Optimum Yield Range 

 in the Fishery Management Plan for the Groundfish Fishery of 

 the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands." The document provided 

 an assessment of the possible effects of increasing the upper 

 limit of the allowable catch of groundfish in the Bering Sea 

 and the Aleutian Islands area from a maximum of 2.0 million 

 metric tons to approximately 2.6 million tons. The Statement 

 noted that the proposed increase in allowable catch could 



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