16 



cruitment, what you are essentially doing is burning a candle at 

 both ends if you continue to fish and your fishing mortality stays 

 high. 



What you are looking at essentially if your spawning is poor and 

 say the 1993 year class was the poorest in the past decade and if 

 you don't have any young coming into the fishery and you are tak- 

 ing or cropping off at the top of that fishery or at the small size 

 of the fishery, either end, and you have nothing to replace it, your 

 stock has got to go down, both your spawners and anything that 

 might recruit to it. 



So I think one of the things we really need to understand is what 

 is taking place both with spawning and with recruitment so we 

 have some idea of what the biomass really is and what is happen- 

 ing to it. 



I think Dusty is absolutely right. It may not be over fishing as 

 such. The problem is that if you have a fixed resource, nothing 

 coming into it and you fish on it, what it means is that the next 

 time your spawning stock has an opportunity to spawn success- 

 fully, there will be fewer of those fish there to spawn if you have 

 harvested them off So that may very well be the kind of situation 

 we are facing, that over fishing per se may not be the problem but 

 it may be part of what has to be done to cure the problem. 



Mr. Saxton. Mr. Dunnigan. 



Mr. Dunnigan. Yes, thank you. I think that Dusty and Jim are 

 both hitting on good points and I would support almost all of what 

 they say. 



I think that the point that Dusty is raising about the need to 

 more fully integrate what we hear from the fishermen on the water 

 into the scientific analysis is a very important one. We are looking 

 at data. When we do good science, the best available science, we 

 are looking at data that is old. It is information that was collected 

 maybe a year or two ago. 



Once we get information it takes a while to check it out make 

 sure that it doesn't have data errors in it and to work it through 

 the system to the point where the stock assessment scientists can 

 use it and then they take time to argue out among themselves as 

 to what is right or wrong or important or unimportant about the 

 information. 



So the best scientific information available is almost always 

 going to be somewhat out of date and so it is very important when 

 the managers sit down and try to figure out how to work this in 

 and make an evaluation of what the right policy for that fishery 

 is as opposed to science. 



It is very important for them to be working closely with fisher- 

 men so that they can ground truth what it is they are working on. 

 So I think it is a very important point that Dusty is making. 



Mr. Saxton. Mr. Matlock. 



Dr. Matlock. I think in response to the basic question that you 

 asked, Mr. Chairman, which is whether or not there is agreement 

 that the spawning stock biomass is decreasing, it seems to me that 

 there is not very much disagreement about that basic question. 



There is disagreement about the causes for what people have 

 concluded is and has occurred and even though we may be behind 

 a year or so in the estimates that get generated and the assess- 



