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The Marine Mammal Commission continues to believe that it would be appro- 



firiate, in certain limited situations, to authorize taking in the course of commercial 

 ishing operations from depleted as well as non-depleted marine mammal stocks. 

 Further, the Commission believes that, in general, tne regime proposed by the Na- 

 tional Marine Fisheries Service would be more woricable, and cheaper to implement, 

 than the alternative regime proposed by the fishing industry and environmental 

 groups. However, the Commission also believes that the Service's proposal could be 

 strengthened by incorporating several elements from the fishing industry/environ- 

 mental community proposal. The Commission believes, for example, that it would 

 be useful to constitute regional groups, along the lines of the conservation teams de- 

 scribed in the industry/environmental community proposal, to develop and overview 

 implementation of long-term strategies for reducing incidental take to as near zero 

 as practicable. If necessary, these re^onal groups also could consider and provide 

 advice to the' National Marine Fisheries Service on allocation of take if current lev- 

 els of take are greater than the biologically acceptable level. 



Thank you Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee for this opportunity to 

 express the views of the Marine Mammal Commission. I would be pleased to try 

 to answer any questions that you or other members may have. 



Senator Kerry. Thank you very much. We do have questions, 

 and I think it would be helpful for us to try to explore this a little 

 bit. 



Dr. Foster, I listened to your explanation of things that one pro- 

 gram did versus another, and likewise. Dr. Hofman. Try to give us 

 the hard line, bottom line here. What is the advantage of what you 

 have proposed versus what the industry/conservation proposal 

 seeks to do? 



Dr. Foster. Several elements of our proposal are missing. In the 

 environmental/industry proposal, for example, one thing that we 

 believe is a very valuable management tool is mandatory registra- 

 tion and a centralized data base. It is not registering just to have 

 people register. We already have a mechanism in place that we de- 

 veloped during the interim exemption, so it will not be expensive 

 to build on this system. 



We believe that such a system serves us well when we need to 

 contact fishermen, if we want to place observers, and if we want 

 to get information out. It gives us information on time and area de- 

 tails. For example, with regard to lethal take, we can pick up on 

 trends that are taking place out there before a situation becomes 

 a problem. And the conditions out there are certainly not static, so 

 because you do not have a problem today in a fishery, does not 

 mean that you won't have a problem tomorrow. And without reg- 

 istration and observer coverage, I think that we are severely handi- 

 capped in how well we do this job. 



The other aspect is, I think, the way we approach targeting our 

 resources. We nave devised a system, as Dr. Hofiman mentioned, 

 where we classify stocks, and then fisheries by the stocks with 

 which they interact. That allows us to focus attention on fisheries 

 interacting with the critical stocks. The fisheiy knows ahead of 

 time what is likely to be required of the individuals. A fisherman 

 only has to contend with one set of restrictions, instead of doing it 

 stock by stock, depending on marine mammal with which you 

 interact. 



Those issues, and along with those issues, of course, go observer 

 coverage on the hot spot areas, the critical fisheries and critical 

 stock; long-term monitoring of the stocks. I think also the burden 

 of proof issue is, perhaps, our overriding concern. With regard to 

 conservation teams, I think some discussions of how they could 



