1 MR. VILD: In the studies that we're looking at, the winter 



2 flounder and the lobsters, you mentioned that the lobsters showed signs 



3 of stress. What sort of stress were you talking about, repressed 



4 respiration? 



5 DR. NEFF: No, we measured growth and a few other things, some 



6 biochemical changes. The major thing was there was a slightly elevated 



7 mortality in the experimental group. It was significant, but it was 



8 small. Juvenile lobsters are hard to keep in the lab, so it's a 



9 difficult situation to assess that. 



10 There was slightly elevated mortality and also the other 



11 parameters, there were slight differences in growth rates and food 



12 ingestion rates. As I say, these are fairly minor. Obviously mortality 



13 isn't minor, but in terms of the difference between the control groups 



14 and the other groups. 



15 DR. BUTMAN: Could you put the block 312 slide up there with the 



16 one you had with the three indices before and after drilling? It seemed 



17 like two out of three of those showed an effect. 



18 DR. NEFF: The 312 one? 



19 DR. BUTMAN: Yes, I think that was the one. This looks like the 



20 upper one is low before and high after? 



21 DR. NEFF: Yes, that's what I indicated. If there was an effect, 



22 it was to increase the abundance of animals and the number of species. 



23 It's interesting that that seemed to persist fairly uniformly for the 



24 rest of the period. 



25 They remained higher and that's why I thought it may be that there 



26 was something anomalous here early on. I don't know if you want to 



27 comment on that. 



28 DR. MACIOLEK: To put it in a slightly different context, we saw 



29 the same pattern at almost all the other regional stations that we 



30 sampled where the second and third years of the program we got higher 



31 abundances. Diversity was pretty much the same, maybe a little bit 



32 higher. 



33 It occurred to me that if the program had started at a different 



34 point in time, say it started at the beginning of year two, where we 



100 



