33 



Ms. Ritchie. I will be the first to insist that I am not a scientist. 

 So, the questions I have may perhaps be more common sense than 

 science-oriented. I go back to the question which we raised in our 

 testimony, which is you can do all of the monitoring you want to 

 do, and it is all good, but you have to know what you are looking 

 for. I think that the issue here, as Stormy brought out, as you 

 move from the question of identifying harm to identifying jeopardy, 

 is what is the meaningful change that you are looking for? How do 

 you define meaningful change, short of dead whales? Somehow we 

 have to have a good definition of what that meaningful change is, 

 otherwise we do not know what we are measuring. It seems to me, 

 then we are saying, well, we have impacts, but we sort of know 

 what they are and we sort of do not know what they are. We sort 

 of have some good ways to measure, and we sort of do not. We are 

 not really sure what we are looking for, and maybe we hope it is 

 all going to come out all right in the end. Quite frankly, as non- 

 scientist, I am not real happy with that. I suspect maybe the 

 whales might not be either. 



So, I come back to this question of meaningful change — that 

 until we have that defined, it seems that the effort is only half- 

 baked. 



Mr. Studds. Let me say what I plan to do is to give everyone a 

 chance to make a final observation, if you wish. It is not mandato- 

 ry. Then I will say a couple of words myself, and we will be done. 

 Before we get to that final process, does anybody want to take one 

 last chance? Mr. Bigford? 



Mr. Bigford. I had two short points, one of them following up on 

 the last comment. The biological opinion and certainly the written 

 testimony does not in any way, shape, or manner, attempt to spell 

 out a complete monitoring plan or explain how we are going to 

 detect change. We certainly realize that we need a lot more flesh 

 there. We also realize that it is far more than people within NOAA 

 that are going to contribute some flesh. The same thing holds for a 

 contingency plan. I note in the written testimony of other wit- 

 nesses that there is some concern about the lack of flesh in the 

 monitoring plan — that objectives do not seem connected to prob- 

 lems. We realize that the document and some of our recommenda- 

 tions were not fully spelled out. The intent of a biological opinion 

 was not to develop a final monitoring plan. So, greater depth will 

 be necessary. 



Also, one other comment that has come up several times from 

 people, from Cape Cod especially, is the concern about some state- 

 ments in a fact sheet that the National Marine Fisheries Service 

 prepared. There was a misstatement. The fact sheet was for our 

 use in explaining some of these complex issues to the general 

 public. Specifically we were talking about the adequacy of available 

 information and proceeding ahead amidst scientific uncertainty. I 

 apologize for the confusion there. Just let it be said that we do 

 indeed have enough information to base our conclusion of, not 

 likely to jeopardize. We have enough information to make that de- 

 cision and no misstatement or misinterpretation that we might 

 have fostered through our fact sheet should cloud that. 



Mr. Studds. Anyone else, before we go to our final round? 



[No response.] 



