37 



salmon. And these questions are unanswered. They need some 

 clear direction, and I don't know whether it is a panel that the gov- 

 ernment sets up or somebody sets up to direct these people as to 

 where they should work on wild fish, and if they are going to have 

 hatcheries, how should the hatchery be operated, what stock 

 should it use, et cetera. And that would be a tremendous asset 

 right now because you do have a tremendous groundswell of local 

 people who want to get involved, and they do need some direction. 



Mrs. Unsoeld. Yes? 



Ms. Kapuscinski. I really agree with those comments, and that is 

 why I referred in my testimony to the work that is going on in the 

 Yakima fisheries project. I should make clear that this team of sci- 

 entists of primarily geneticists are developing these hatchery-oper- 

 ating guidelines and risk assessment monitoring guidelines, but 

 they are not going to be just for use in the Yakima Basin. We were 

 asked, in fact, very early on in the task to try to make them as 

 generic as possible. And ultimately we are expecting to have them 

 in the kind of handbook, very user friendly, format so that differ- 

 ent parties trying to use hatcheries have that kind of clear direc- 

 tion. And they do have to be flexible. Versatility has to be an ele- 

 ment of those guidelines, but Mr. Sayre is correct that up to now 

 although a lot of that knowledge of how to do this was held in the 

 minds of different scientists, it hasn't been compiled very well and 

 presented in a user friendly manner. 



Mrs. Unsoeld. Yes. Dr. Koenings. 



Mr. Koenings. I will respond from the viewpoint of Alaska's pro- 

 gram. 



Mrs. Unsoeld. I am sorry. Speak into the mike. 



Mr. Koenings. I am sorry. I was going to respond more from the 

 origins of the Alaska program and will sort of mirror the com- 

 ments here. What we had in place before we started the program 

 were policies that looked at genetic impacts, policies that looked at 

 the effect of fish diseases, policies that said this is the way we are 

 going to do business. This allowed the public to know what was al- 

 lowable and what was not allowable and also, of course, guided the 

 program from the start. We are in the same sort of boat now when 

 we are looking at shellfish farming in the state. We don't have 

 policies directed toward shellfish in terms of disease or in terms of 

 genetics at present. But we are building those policies before the 

 farms begin operating. 



That is the kind of thing I think is necessary here — to get a 

 policy developed clearly from the scientific point of view but also 

 from the point of view of informing the public what is allowable 

 and what isn't. And once you have done that, you have brought the 

 two groups together in terms of forming a team, and that buys 

 stewardship of the resource. And once you have established that, I 

 think you have got a lot of the battle already won. 



Mrs. Unsoeld. Do any of the panel members have anything else 

 that they would like to add to the record at this point? Mr. Sayre. 

 Mr. Sayre. Just to say on this very subject, I have been talking 

 with some other organizations and some of Dr. Hershberger's col- 

 leagues at UW is whether we can pull together a group of fishery 

 scientists to address this specific problem in the next few months 

 and set up some kind of meeting or whatever that hopefully would 



