31 



we see from a low, as I said, of 20 million pieces harvested on aver- 

 age, now we have 150 to 200 million pieces being harvested. 



Concurrent with that program because of the social and econom- 

 ic concerns over a lack of fish to harvest in the '70's, we established 

 the Division of Fisheries Rehabilitation Enhancement and Develop- 

 ment which now I am director of. This particular division was 

 charged with the responsibility of building back the salmon runs. I 

 think it speaks to the single factor that we have heard here today 

 as alignment, if you will. In Alaska,the state, of course, is responsi- 

 ble for the management of its resources. It gave a single agency the 

 responsibility to basically build the runs back, develop a hatchery 

 program, develop the hatchery protocols, develop the various egg- 

 take procedures, i.e., how you do business. It also learned very 

 quickly that the biggest aspect of doing this correctly is learning 

 how to control the people. Fish respond if the people are put to the 

 right task. 



So I think the key thing that we had was a single agency, you 

 have a single group of people who are charged, both in terms of 

 science and policy, with doing the program correctly. I think that is 

 why it is successful today. We didn't have the myriad Federal 

 groups, state groups, et cetera, all vying for a piece of the pie. 

 There was one particular group that was made responsible. They 

 put themselves to the task and are successful today because of it. 



Ms. FuRSE. Thank you. Mr. Sayre, I wonder if you could tell me 

 what systems you have in place for monitoring and evaluating the 

 success of your efforts — particularly life history and genetics? How 

 do you monitor those? 



Mr. Sayre. Well, in terms of monitoring the success of the fish 

 that come back, the technique is very simple in terms of tagging. 

 But in terms of the genetics, we have the National Marine Fisher- 

 ies Service's geneticist, Robin Wapples, in the Northwest, and in 

 the Washington Department of Fisheries geneticist Jim Schackley 

 have worked out the procedures by which we need to take fish and 

 how to raise them with keeping families separate to get the proper 

 genetic mix so that we are not doing damage. And I can't explain 

 all that right here very well, but they have laid out very specific 

 procedures for the genetic work. 



Ms. FuRSE. I have one more question if I may. Dr. Kapuscinski, I 

 have read the Fish and Wildlife Service in the supplementation 

 found that 25 out of 26 programs were successful, and Dr. Koenings 

 has talked about successful restoration programs. In your opinion, 

 is the risk of losing depleted populations greater than the risk of 

 using supplementation to restore the populations? Given the risk of 

 loss, how do we set a standard? Is it too high, or what is your re- 

 sponse? 



Ms. Kapuscinski. I think it is difficult to really have one re- 

 sponse. I think it depends on which populations you are looking at 

 and what parts of the region they are in and also how severely de- 

 clined they are. If you are getting very close to extinction, I think 

 personally I would come on the side then of intervening, but hope- 

 fully that is the last resort, and intervening at that point and using 

 hatcheries because, obviously, you can't reverse the causes that led 

 to the population being near extinction fast enough. 



