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Let me emphasize that I am supportive of the Boston Harbor 

 cleanup. However, as we devise ways to right past errors in Boston 

 Harbor, we must not be any less rigorous in what should, I believe, 

 be our parallel efforts to assure the future of the bays and of the 

 habitat of those whales. After all, Boston Harbor would not be in 

 its sorry state if years ago we had not rushed to correct one pollu- 

 tion problem by in fact creating another. 



For the past nine years my research has focused on the habitat 

 use patterns and population characteristics of the northern right 

 whale within the Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bay's ecosystem. 

 The right whale population of the North Atlantic is depleted. Its 

 numbers have declined, some suggest, to less than one one-hun- 

 dredth of the pre-whaling levels. The recovery rate remains exceed- 

 ingly low, in fact, low after many decades, after whaling had final- 

 ly ceased. Possibly this is because of other perils, because of gear 

 entanglement, collision with vessels and the fouling and elimina- 

 tion of critical habitats. 



We know, for instance, that whales were once common, before 

 the 1600's, in the eastern North Atlantic. Now they are gone from 

 the Bay of Biscay, from the Coast of Norway and from the shores 

 of North Africa. In the western North Atlantic today, we may be 

 viewing the last stand of the great right whale, for no longer do 

 they feed or nurse in their old haunts, in the shallows of Delaware 

 Bay, in the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound. Yet, the last right 

 whales still do visit North America. For, among the few remaining 

 habitats they still use, they come to the coast of Massachusetts, to 

 the bays where the sewage from Boston has and will be discharged 

 in the hundred million gallon lot. 



We know from our studies that probably more than two-thirds of 

 the remaining 325 or fewer right whales left in the entire North 

 Atlantic Ocean visit the bays to feed on the rich plankton, to so- 

 cialize and to nurse their young. As the right whale is clearly one 

 of the most severely imperiled of the great whales, and as the bay's 

 system is one of its few remaining habitats, I propose to you and to 

 the Subcommittee that we cannot take any chance with the bay's 

 ecosystem. We must assure its future by both cleaning up the 

 harbor and by coping with the uncertainty which dominates our 

 management, such as it is, of the coastal waters, by instituting a 

 rigorous monitoring plan. 



The biological opinion correctly recognizes what has been given 

 little emphasis by Government agencies in the past — that coastal 

 ecosystems, which are so very important to human and animal so- 

 cieties are unfathomably complex and, in spite of our efforts, 

 nearly impossible to truly manage. So, absent an iron-clad predic- 

 tive model of coastal ecosystems and yet confronted by the pressing 

 need to clean up Boston Harbor, it may well be that the MWRA 

 project is the best present-day solution. We must acknowledge, as 

 the biological opinion has, that the consequences of the project are 

 not absolutely known, while the consequence to the right whale of 

 an error in our prediction may, in a very real sense, be absolute. 



In recognition of these conditions, the biological opinion recom- 

 mends, in general terms, the monitoring of right whale habitat. 

 With regard to these recommendations, I respectfully encourage 

 the following: One, that the recommendations be fully implement- 



