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Tissu* Archival Project (AMMTAP) , sponsored by the Minerals 

 Management Service (MMS) of the Department of the Interior, is 

 now being managed by NOAA's National Marine Mammal Tissue Bank 

 and stranding Archive Network Program. Based on an agreement 

 with MMS, tissues will continue to be collected and will 

 subsequently be stored at the Department of Commerce's National 

 Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) , where all samples 

 are banked. Samples from as many as 10 bowhead whales taken 

 during the 1992 subsistence hunts at Borrow, Alaska, will be 

 collected as part of the AMMTAP. The sampling will be conducted 

 with the help of the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife 

 Management. With the assistance of the NMFS's Western Alaska 

 Field Office in Anchorage, samples night also be collected this 

 year from beluga whales (as many as 5 animals) taken in native 

 subsistence hunts or from strandinga in Cook Inlet. In the case 

 of both the bowheads and the belugas, additional sonples will be 

 collected for contaminant analysis by the NMF8 Northwest 

 Fisheries Center. 



NOAA's National Status and Trends (NS&T) Program for Marine 

 Environmental Quality includes projects that periodically monitor 

 the levels of about 70 different toxic contaminants, both heavy 

 metals and persistent organic contaminants, at sites around the 

 coasts of the United States. Nine of these sites are along the 



