Under the revised draft regime, only Class A 
fisheries would be subject to comprehensive monitor- 
ing on an annual basis. Only when the total fisheries 
removal was expected to exceed the portion of. the 
potential biological removal level allocated to fisher- 
ies, however, would annual monitoring be required. 
Class B fisheries would, at the Service’s discretion, be 
monitored every two to five years. Class C fisheries 
would be monitored every five to ten years, depend- 
ing on the estimated level of incidental removals. 
Fishery-specific quotas would be established only 
for Class A fisheries, and then only if the portion of 
the potential biological removal level allocated to 
fisheries would likely be exceeded. Removals in 
fisheries subject to quotas would be monitored suffi- 
ciently to enable the Service to implement restrictions 
on fishing activities if necessary to prevent the poten- 
tial biological removal level from being exceeded. 
Other major changes contained in the Service’s 
revised draft regime included streamlining of the 
allocation process, requiring development of annual 
research plans to fill data gaps with respect to marine 
mammal stocks, recommending that the new regime 
be implemented under a “phased strategy” with a goal 
of reducing take to potential biological removal levels 
by the end of 1997. 
The Commission provided comments on the 
Service’s revised draft regime by letter of 20 Decem- 
ber 1991. While the revised proposal responded to 
some of the comments and recommendations provid- 
ed by the Commission and others on the original 
proposal, it failed to address others. Moreover, some 
of the modifications made the revised draft regime, in 
the Commission’s view, “even less adequate” than the 
initial version. The Commission expressed its belief 
that the revised proposal could and should be im- 
proved 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 
95 
Chapter IV — Marine Mammal-Fisheries Interactions 
example, the revised regime did not appear to recog- 
nize 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 or natural catastrophes. It also 
appeared, as noted above, that the Service was pro- 
posing to use current carrying capacity as the basis for 
making status-of-stocks determinations without consid- 
ering human-caused habitat degradation and destruc- 
tion. 
Many of the apparent deficiencies in the Service’s 
revised draft regime may have been attributable to the 
lack of detail in the proposal. For example, it pur- 
ported 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 programs, as had 
been recommended by the Commission previously. In 
addition, while the revised proposal indicated that 
recovery and conservation plans could establish 
removal levels more restrictive than the calculated 
potential biological removal level, it did not describe 
those situations in which it would be appropriate to do 
so. Also, it did not provide criteria for making such 
determinations, as the Commission had recommended. 
In light of these and other omissions, the Commission 
pointed out 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 
proposal to: 
¢ include the specific statutory amendments and 
related report language that the Service would pro- 
pose to establish the regime; 
e 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 ten percent increase in the estimated time it 
will take the population to reach its maximum net 
productivity level; 
