Chapter HI — Marine Mammal-Fisheries Interactions 



The Commission provided comments on the 

 Service's revised proposed regime by letter of 20 

 December 1991. While the revised proposal respond- 

 ed to some of the conmients and recommendations 

 provided by the Conmiission and others on the origi- 

 nal proposal, it failed to address others. Moreover, 

 some of the modifications instituted by the Service 

 made the revised proposal, in the Commission's view, 

 "even less adequate" than the earlier version. The 

 Commission expressed its belief that the revised 

 proposal could and should be improved and indicated 

 a willingness to recommend that Congress postpone 

 the deadline for transmitting the suggested regime to 

 enable the identified deficiencies to be corrected. 



The Commission noted that both the original and 

 revised proposals were, in some respects, inconsistent 

 with the Recommended Guidelines provided by the 

 Commission and the fundamental purposes and 

 policies of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. For 

 example, the Service's revised regime would appar- 

 endy allow takes from all sources to exceed the 

 estimated sustainable removal levels, at least during 

 the initial phases of implementation. Enactment of the 

 Service's proposal could therefore allow certain 

 marine mammal stocks to be reduced below their 

 maximum net productivity levels and might signifi- 

 cantly delay or prevent recovery of depleted species 

 and stocks. 



Further, the revised regime did not appear to 

 recognize or consider situations in which marine 

 mammal survival and productivity are being or may 

 be reduced by habitat degradation or destruction, or 

 by unusual disease outbreaks, natural catastrophe, etc. 

 For example, it failed to address the adverse impacts 

 that might result from such things as commercial 

 exploitation of key marine mammal prey species, 

 offshore oil and gas development, non-point source 

 pollution, and unusual die-offs such as have occurred 

 in several areas in recent years. That is, the revised 

 proposal considered only direct mortality and serious 

 injury from incidental fisheries take, subsistence 

 hunting, and other known and quantifiable human 

 sources. It also appeared that the Service was propos- 

 ing to use current carrying capacity, without consider- 

 ing human-caused habitat degradation and destruction, 

 as the basis for making status-of-stocks determina- 

 tions. 



Many of the apparent deficiencies in the Service's 

 revised proposed regime may have been attributable to 

 the lack of detail in the proposal. For example, the 

 proposal purported to retain the Act's zero mortality 

 rate goal, but neither described the programs needed 

 to meet the goal nor estimated the cost of such pro- 

 grams. In addition, while the proposal indicated that 

 recovery and conservation plans could establish 

 removal levels more restrictive than the potential 

 biological removal level, it did not describe those 

 situations in which it would be appropriate to do so 

 and did not provide any criteria for making such 

 determinations. In light of these and other omissions, 

 the Commission noted that it was impossible to assess 

 the pros and cons of the revised proposal accurately. 



To overcome the deficiencies, the Commission 

 recommended, among other things, that the National 

 Marine Fisheries Service revise and expand the 

 legislative proposal to: 



• include the specific statutory amendments and 

 related report language that the Service will pro- 

 pose to establish the regime; 



• specify what the Service means by the term "sound 

 principles of wildlife management"; 



• prohibit taking from species or populations whose 

 minimum estimated size is less than 3,000 individ- 

 uals or 30 percent of the best available estimate of 

 historic abundance, whichever is higher, unless it 

 reasonably can be demonstrated that the population 

 is increasing at its maximum potential rate and the 

 authorized level of take will not cause a greater 

 than 10 percent increase in the estimated time it 

 will take the population to reach its maximum net 

 productivity level; 



• take account of situations where either marine 

 mammal survival or productivity has been or may 

 be affected by habitat degradation or destruction; 



• identify situations and propose criteria for deciding 

 when recovery plans and conservation plans for 

 endangered, threatened, and depleted species 

 should be used to establish removal levels less than 

 the estimated potential biological removal levels; 



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