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Senator Kerry. The industry and conservation groups are both 

 critical of the classification process, for classifying the critical and 

 noncritical stocks. I do not know if you want to join in also, Dr. 

 Hofman; but they have proposed an alternative scientific frame- 

 work for trying to do that. What are the fundamental differences 

 between your approach to classifying stocks and the industry/envi- 

 ronmental approach? 



Dr. Foster. Again, I think under our approach, by categorizing 

 the fishery based on the kinds of stocks they are interacting with, 

 we feel that we are able to narrowly focus all of our requirements, 

 our restrictions, our attention if you will, to those fisheries, and 

 those marine mammal stocks that are most in need. 



We think, under our proposal, that a fisherman, as I indicated 

 earlier, knows what category his fishery has been put in, so he 

 knows the kinds of things that are going to be required, and he will 

 only have to answer to that one regime. The way we understand 

 the negotiated proposal, you classify the stocks with which a fish- 

 ery interacts. It may interact with three or four different stocks. 

 Each stock may be looked at by a conservation team, and you may 

 have different requirements; so that a fisherman would be sub- 

 jected to different management regimes. 



Senator Kerry. Some might argue that that approach will pro- 

 vide better conservation and a more realistic relationship, if you 

 will, to that particular fishing environment, than a more all-encom- 

 passing and less specific one, which is what you seem to have pro- 

 posed. And it may be less confusing, I think, in the application. 



Dr. Foster. Perhaps I am not being very clear. It seems to me 

 that ours would be less confusing. 



Senator Kerry. Well, help us understand that. I will tell you 

 this: I am confused. 



Dr. Foster. Sometimes I am confused, too. All right. What we 

 are saying is that by classifying the fishery, you can narrow the 

 scope of your problem fisheries. 



For example, we did a trial run early on this year, before we had 

 all of the data. 



Senator Kerry. Give us an example. You classify a whole fishery. 

 What are you talking about? 



Dr. Foster. We classified fisheries that would be category 1 fish- 

 eries. These would be the fisheries that interact with our alpha 

 stocks. These are the stocks that are endangered, threatened, or 

 depleted. So, these are the critical species, the stocks in trouble. 



So, our category 1 fisheries react with those stocks; and we came 

 up with about six. We think that looking at some new information, 

 we may come up with even fewer. And so we would have this many 

 fisheries that we would be targeting with the bulk of our resource 

 management. 



Senator Kerry. Targeting to do what? 



Dr. Foster. Well, we would be focusing all of our attention there. 

 We would be looking at what needed to be done, in order to con- 

 serve these stocks. We would be looking at restrictions on fishing, 

 area time closures. We would be looking at gear possibilities; we 

 would be working with the fishery management councils, to see 

 what could be done through the fishery management plans, this 



