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HARD HARVEST ON THE BERING SEA
By BRYAN HODGSON
National Geographic Senior Writer

A January storm hurls 50-knot winds at the trawler Saga Sea as we
wallow in freezing darkness on the Bering Sea, about 50 miles
north of the Aleutian Islands.  On deck snow swirls around
brilliant sodium-vapor lamps as a huge green-and-orange net comes
slithering up the stern ramp, bloated like some sea monster with
more than 120 tons of walleye pollock.

The Saga Sea is something of a sea monster herself, a 304-foot,
58-million-dollar factory ship equipped to catch and digest some
550 tons of fish a day.  In her belly scores of men and women
work round the clock, serving ferocious machines that behead the
fish at blinding speed, slicing off fillets and grinding
leftovers into fish meal.

Tonight we're also on a gourmet quest.  Billions of pollock are
migrating from the Bering's 12,000-foot-deep Aleutian Basin
toward shallower spawning grounds on Alaska's outer continental
shelf. Their delicate pink roe sacs are worth about five dollars
a pound. Each must be plucked carefully by hand.  If all goes
well, we'll return to Dutch Harbor with some 400 tons of frozen
roe, worth four million dollars.

We're not alone in this high-tech feeding frenzy.  Radar shows 20
vessels nearby, part of an American fishing armada that takes
three billion dollars' worth of pollock and other bottom fish
from the Bering each year.

On the darkened bridge, Capt.  Kurt van Brero peers at a color
monitor that shows an incredible picture:  thousands of digital
blips, each representing a fish, swimming slowly into the
two-acre maw of our newly launched trawl net.  I suddenly realize
that it took five billion blips like this to make up last year's
five-million-ton pollock harvest, the largest single-species
catch in the world.

"There's still a lot of fish," he says.  "But in five years I've
seen the pollock biomass reduced by half.  I hate to think we may
be fishing ourselves out of business."

It's an old dilemma in this storm-tossed sea:  How to harvest a
wealth of marine life without destroying it.  The Bering's
885,000 square miles of frigid, nutrient-rich waters lie between
Alaska and the Russian Far East, bounded on the south by Alaska's
Aleutian chain and escaping northward through the Bering Strait
to the Arctic Ocean.

I'd boarded the Saga Sea as part of a nine-month exploration of
the Bering by ship, plane, helicopter, and Eskimo skin boat.  I'd
crossed the Bering Strait, camped amid walrus hunters on the
eastern shores of Russia, visited the remotest islands of the
Aleutian chain, and talked to scores of scientists, fishermen,
and native leaders from Seattle, Washington, to Fairbanks,
Alaska, to Vladivostok in the then Soviet Union.

I'd quickly learned that working on that sea, or simply surviving
around its edges, means a life of hardship and isolation, an
unceasing struggle with nature for sustenance or profits.  The
weak seldom prosper.  The strong don't always win.

Russian fur traders were first to cash in on the Bering's
ecosystem in the mid-18th century, seeking sea otter and seal
skins for trade with China and Europe.  Within a hundred years
industrial hunters from around the world devastated the
populations of sea otters, fur seals, and whales.  Now an
international battle was raging over the pollock, a form of
codfish that only a few years ago was considered unworthy of
American attention.

Most of the Bering Sea lies within 200-nautical-mile exclusive
economic zones claimed by the United States and Russia, which
limit their combined pollock catch to about 2.5 million tons a
year.  But there's a "donut hole" of international waters in the
middle of the sea; here unregulated fishing fleets of Japan,
China, South Korea, and Poland have caught as much as 1.3 million
tons--an added burden that Russian and American scientists say
may severely deplete the pollock population.

What's more, much of the "international" catch comes from illegal
raids into the more productive American zone.  Such depredations
have caused a 24 percent decline in pollock catches throughout
the Bering, according to the U.S.  National Marine Fisheries
Service (NMFS).  And since the 1970s commercial fishing may have
contributed to a reported 63 percent population crash among
pollock-eating Steller sea lions, and similar declines among
seabirds as well.

"Nonterritorial waters represent only 8 percent of the Bering
Sea, while fish stocks there are primarily from U.S.  and Russian
zones," said Vjacheslav K.  Zilanov, deputy director of the
Ministry of Fisheries, in Moscow.  "We believe that the United
States and Russia should develop a specific conservation regimen
for shared stocks of Bering Sea fish.  Third countries should
observe these regulations."

"Since 1980 the groundfish industry in U.S.  waters has gone from
a million to three billion dollars a year," he told me.  "That
includes bottom-dwelling fish like cod, turbot, and sole, as well
as pollock.

"The story goes back to the Magnuson Fishery Conservation Act of
1976, which banned unlicensed foreign vessels from fishing in
American waters.  Crabs were then the main resource for U.S.
fishermen.  Crab sold for a dollar a pound.  Groundfish were
selling for five cents a pound or less.

"By 1978-79 the crab population appeared headed for
collapse--probably the result of overfishing.  A few American
ships converted to trawling.  They would catch fish and sell them
'over the side' to Japanese and Russian ships--meaning that they
would not even take their nets out of the water, but transfer
them to foreign ships directly and take new nets in their place.
That's how the U.S.  got into the pollock business.

"But as the price of fish goes up, more and more American-flagged
boats are being built.  We need to control that before the
politics of investment and boat ownership prevent rational
management of the resource."

Assigned by law to advise the U.S.  Department of Commerce in
such matters is the North Pacific Fishery Management Council,
which includes representatives from industry groups and state and
federal agencies.  In Anchorage I listened to intense debates
that seemed like a hopeless tangle of nets and lines.

Investors in the Saga Sea and other factory trawlers denounced
proposed regulations allotting up to 45 percent of the annual
pollock quota to the rival smaller boats.

Trawlermen protested a decision to halt fishing for pollock, cod,
sole, and sablefish whenever the boats hauled in an excessive
"bycatch" of other regulated species such as snow crabs and
halibut.

Crabbers spoke against a trawling technique called "hard on
bottom," which some boats use.  Nets plow along the seabed,
taking whatever is there.  "We now lose two to five million crabs
a year to this," said Arni Thomson of the Alaska Crab Coalition.

Robert D.  Alverson, of the Fishing Vessel Owners' Association in
Seattle, blames much controversy on ignorance.  "We have a
three-billion-dollar industry and no science dollars," he said.
"It's like trying to look at the sea bottom through a straw."

Most of the fishing industry's contrary forces reach critical
mass at Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island in the Aleutians, famed
for the rigor of its weather and the vigorous nightlife of its
waterfront bars.  My 800-mile flight from Anchorage ended with a
landing in violent crosswinds, a few moments ahead of a blizzard
that isolated the island for three days.

Here was a world dedicated to seafood.  Dirt roads were lined
with crab pots--500-pound steel-and-wire cages used to capture
300 million pounds of snow crabs each year.  Dozens of boats
ranging from 90 to 200 feet were tied up side by side with small
trawlers that served four huge fish-processing plants.  Sleek
factory trawlers came to off-load frozen product and hasten to
sea again.  In the roadstead a dozen rusty Japanese "tramper"
refrigerator ships awaited cargoes from all.

"There's big money here now--it's becoming a mini-Seattle," said
Lynn Fitch, director of the local television station.  She came
to Dutch Harbor with her husband in 1980, when a king crab
harvest of 130 million pounds was creating instant wealth for
many fishermen.  When overfishing dropped the harvest to almost
zero within three years, the Fitches decided to stay.

"Now we have the pollock boom," Lynn said.  "I hope this one
lasts awhile." Later, I learned, the family retreated to the
mainland, fearful that the chaos of development would lead to the
deterioration of the community and the collapse of property
values.

Among the custodians of Dutch Harbor's new prosperity is F.
Gregory Baker, general manager of Westward Seafood Company.  The
prosperity will last only if the U.S.  Department of Commerce
authorizes the formal allocation of fish quotas to the smaller
boats that bring their catch to shoreside factories, he told me.

He showed me around the company's new 50-million-dollar
processing plant, which is owned by the Taiyo Fishing Company of
Japan.  Its batteries of stainless-steel machines are designed to
reduce 800 tons of pollock each day into 160 tons of surimi, an
almost flavorless fish product made by grinding fish fillets to
paste, washing it repeatedly so that only protein solids remain,
then reducing it to a somewhat rubbery texture by adding sugar
and sorbitol gelling agent.

"The Japanese use it to make fish cakes called kamaboko, but you
might recognize it if you've eaten any fake crab legs or lobster
tails lately," Mr.  Baker said.

Death rates are expected to diminish, thanks to the Commercial
Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988, which requires that
each ship carry life rafts and EPIRB (emergency
position-indicating radio beacon) transmitters that automatically
relay the vessel's name and location via satellite to rescue
agencies.  It also requires that each crew member be provided
with a "Gumby suit," as the heavy neoprene survival suits are
called.

"These suits have kept people alive for 12 days in water so cold
it can paralyze you in minutes," Captain Smith said.  "It was the
Wives Association that pushed for them, not the fishermen.  They
were tired of hubby not coming home.  We owe them a lot."

Danger is part of the environment for pilots like Lt.  Comdr.
W.C. Kessenich and Lt.  Randy L.  Moseng, who fly the Coast
Guard's Sikorsky H-3 rescue helicopters through some of the worst
weather in the world.  "I'm a risk manager, not a risk taker,"
Commander Kessenich said, as we flew in pitch darkness along the
Kodiak coast on a training flight using night vision goggles.  "I
have the option of turning down a rescue flight if the weather's
unflyable, or if the victim has access to care or shelter.  But
if the victim's in the water, we'll push it pretty hard."

Sometimes that's very hard indeed.  The goggles reveal a ghostly
green world, full of shoals and precipitous cliffs.  Quietly
Commander Kessenich pointed out one of them.  "We lost a
helicopter there on a night rescue," he said.  "There were no
survivors."

Fishery patrols also occupy Coast Guard time.  Six C-130 Hercules
transports from Kodiak provide daily intelligence for two
378-foot cutters and two smaller boats covering three million
square miles of the Bering Sea and northern Pacific.  Recently
the patrols led to the arrest of 12 foreign boats in U.S.
waters--including two Russian trawlers.

"I've seen 80 foreign boats lined up at the U.S.  boundary,
waiting for darkness," C-130 skipper Lt.  Geoff Funk told me as
we headed toward Attu Island on a perfect flying day.  It can be
the "boring Bering" on uneventful ten-hour patrols.  "But when
you're flying low in bad weather," he said, "ice can form within
30 seconds on the wings and ruin the airfoil.  If you get through
a winter without scaring yourself, you're pretty lucky."

For years I had dreamed of traveling the Aleutians, this remote
chain of islands flung like fallen asteroids in a 1,100-mile arc
across the sea.  They turned out to have more of a neighborhood
feeling than I'd expected.  At the U.S.  Naval Air Station on
Adak, halfway down the chain, P-3 Orion antisubmarine planes take
off on constant patrols. There I found a suburban village of
5,000 people, complete with a McDonald's, a shopping mall, and
modern housing for spouses and children accompanying servicemen
on two-year tours.

At Shemya Air Force Base, near the islands' western tip, the
"official" wind sock is a heavy chunk of wood dangling on a
chain. "We have two seasons here--winter and fog," said weather
station chief Master Sgt.  Jeff Fries.  "In spring and summer we
get warm subtropical air that condenses when it hits the Bering's
45-degree water.  That produces 2,000 to 3,000 feet of dense fog,
which persists until autumn.  In winter we get low pressure
systems moving east from Siberia--a major one every 48 to 72
hours, with minimum 50-knot winds.  When it blows 70 knots, that
wooden wind sock is no joke."

Weather is one of the few things not labeled top secret at
Shemya, where Air Force RC-135 jets fly electronic and
photographic missions to monitor Russian intercontinental missile
tests.  The missiles are launched from sites in central Asia and
land on or near the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Attu Island, the westernmost of the Aleutians, is one of the
bleaker ends of the earth.  Its only inhabitants are 22 Coast
Guardsmen whose lonely task is to maintain a loran station that
broadcasts navigational signals for ships and aircraft.

Attu is strewn with ruins of World War II U.S.  military
buildings, collapsing amid a forest of bare utility poles that
look like melancholy totem poles of a lost tribe.  On May 11,
1943, two tribes from opposite sides of the Pacific met here in
mortal combat, when some 16,000 U.S.  troops stormed ashore at
Massacre Bay to displace Japanese invaders.  In 18 days of savage
fighting, 549 Americans and 2,350 Japanese were killed.

With Coast Guard navigator Dave Kinney, an amateur historian, I
drove to a windswept hilltop to see a titanium starburst monument
left by Japanese pilgrims in memory of their own.  In this
loneliest of places, it was difficult to shed a feeling of
emptiness and woe.

When the Japanese invaded invaded, a third tribe became victims
too. Almost 900 Aleut villagers were evacuated by U.S.

Recently archaeologists discovered that tectonic forces and the
melting of ancient glaciers have gradually raised shoreline
terraces. "Now we find old habitation sites 40 to 100 feet high
on Kodiak, on Prince William Sound, and along the Aleutian
Islands," Dr.  Knecht said.  "There are tens of thousands of
sites, indicating at least 5,000 years of occupancy."

Today about 2,000 Aleuts live in the Aleutian and Pribilof
Islands. On St.  George and St.  Paul, 600 miles west of Kodiak,
they share their volcanic habitat with some 900,000 fur seals,
who arrive each spring to engage in what may be the noisiest--and
is certainly the smelliest--mating game on earth.  "The
Russian-American Company brought us here to hunt seals around
1787," St.  Paul city manager Larry Merculieff told me.  "After
the Russians left, commercial hunters from outside almost
destroyed the stock.  In 1911 the U.S. government took over
management of the seal harvest by international treaty.  We
hunted for the government, and the stocks were rehabilitated.

"We thought we'd be independent in 1983, when the government
pulled out and turned the harvest over to us.  We made a $500,000
profit in the first season.  But in 1985 animal-rights groups
pressured Congress to end sealing.  Now the Marine Mammal
Protection Act requires that when we hunt we take only the meat
and destroy the skins."

Although fur seals were listed as depleted in 1988, with a
population only 35 to 40 percent of historic peak levels, most
scientists agree that hunting of some 16,000 subadult males a
year did not influence birthrates.

To replace sealing with other ocean-related industry, federal
agencies have spent a hundred million dollars on breakwaters and
port facilities at St.  Paul and St.  George.  Japanese investors
have built fish-and-crab processing plants where fishermen can
bring their catch, saving a 36-hour trip to Dutch Harbor.

For some islanders it's not enough.  "We built this harbor to
make our people fishermen, not just cannery workers," said Ron
Philemonoff, chief executive of the native-owned TDX Corporation.
"But we can't get financing for boats.  Are we going to be just a
gas station for the fleet, with a few seven-dollar-an-hour
jobs--right in the middle of a multimillion-dollar fishery?  We
are asking the government for an 8 percent direct allocation of
the Bering fish resource.  We need guaranteed access to fish."

By now it occurred to me that perhaps man is the Bering Sea
mammal that has suffered mismanagement most of all.

One notable feat of mismanagement on the Bering Sea began in
1948, when the Soviet Union closed the Bering Strait and turned
its eastern border into a Cold War barricade.  In 1988 the strait
became a two-way street again, thanks to two Nome businessmen,
real estate broker Jim Stimpfle and air service operator Jim
Rowe, who persuaded Soviet leaders to allow private U.S.
aircraft to fly across the strait.* Today, Rowe's Bering Air
service makes 100 to 150 charter flights a year to Provideniya,
capital of the Chukchi Peninsula.

"We used to take rubles for Russian passengers--even though we
couldn't spend them," Rowe told me.  "Friendship--that's why I
stick with this.  Many of our passengers are Eskimos, visiting
relatives they haven't seen for 50 years."

In Nome I boarded a Bering Air Piper Navajo for the 240-mile
flight to Provideniya.  Sergei Frolov, a young Soviet marine
architect, had invited NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC to join the first
stage of a two-year expedition in which he and an international
crew planned to sail skin boats called umiaks from the Chukchi
Peninsula to visit native communities in Alaska, Canada, and
Greenland.

There were difficulties, I discovered on arriving.  Expedition
members had been delayed by problems with Soviet entry visas.
And high winds would delay our trip by water to the expedition's
launching site at Sireniki, an ancient Eskimo village 30 miles
away. What was the plan?

"The plan is, we're stuck," said Sergei.  That gave me a chance
to explore Provideniya.  It looked like a city that had made war
on itself and lost.  Its largely Rus-sian population trudged
unpaved roads and lived in drab prefabricated apartment buildings
beneath a pall of coal smoke belching from power and heating
plants.  Food stores were almost empty.

I was glad at last to help launch Sergei's 30-foot umiak in the
blighted harbor and emerge into a sparkling seascape, where
walruses surfaced to observe our passage and white seabirds
startled by our motor poured like waterfalls from mist-shrouded
cliffs.

We arrived at Sireniki on the crest of a breaking wave.  A dozen
hip-booted villagers hauled us up the gray pebble beach.

One day, while visiting the cluster of yarangas, or tents, of
Reindeer Brigade No.  3, I watched Ivan Rultytagin engage in a
distinctly nontraditional activity.  From his tractor he unloaded
cartons filled with American blue jeans, T-shirts, sweat pants,
cosmetics, and battery-powered cassette players.  Herders arrived
from outlying brigades to buy these luxury goods with rubles.

The real medium of exchange is reindeer horn.  Korean men believe
swallowing powdered antlers improves sexual powers--a belief so
strong that the bone dust, mixed with reindeer blood plasma,
sells for more than $150 an ounce in Seoul.  An informal system
allows the collectives' management to ship the antlers to Eskimo
partners in Alaska.  Korean agents pay for them in dollars.
American partners buy consumer goods unobtainable in Russia and
ship them to the herders.

"We have many rubles," a herder told me.  "There is nothing in
our own stores to buy."

Somehow it seemed that the need for such convoluted economic
strategies had paralyzed and shamed the very soul of Russia.  But
the soul survived in unexpected places.  One day while hiking
along coastal cliffs amid a fragrance of sage, I found the shack
of ornithologist Nikolai Konyukhov.  For nine years he has
studied the crested auklet, a tiny, orange-beaked creature that
is one of the most dedicated international commuters in the
world.

Each day, Nikolai told me, some 100,000 of the birds fly from
Sireniki to U.S.  waters off St.  Lawrence Island, where they
dive as deep as 130 feet to feed on zooplankton--a round trip of
160 miles.

At sunset we witnessed their return, an endless swarm of small
black silhouettes, swirling, gabbling, squeaking, wings sounding
like the wind as they circled the rookery for more than an hour.
Gradually they landed and vanished into deep crevices in rocks,
voices still echoing like subterranean spirits.

Spirits of another kind also dwell on the Bering coast, silent,
nameless.  They live at Whale Alley, on Yttygran Island, where a
sweeping arc of giant whale skulls faces the sea, jawbones
planted deeply in the pebble strand by unknown hunters centuries
ago as a monument to the thousands of great whales that passed by
on migration each year.

I traveled there by boat with Vasily Yattelen, a 47-year-old
Eskimo who works as a diesel mechanic on the Dawn of Communism
State Farm at Novoye Chaplino.  Whale Alley is his birthplace, he
told me, and it is important for him to come here occasionally
and leave a small offering of food.

As we sailed back to the mainland, I could see dozens of whale
spouts glittering against the setting sun.  But they were the
modest exhalations of gray whales and belugas.  The giants seldom
come nowadays.

I returned to Provideniya to discover that the Chukchi
Peninsula's notorious fog had turned the airport into a sort of
Russian purgatory, filled with lost souls camping wretchedly on
their luggage.  Such fogs are known to last for days, and I was
due to meet some of the Soviet Union's top marine scientists in
Vladivostok, headquarters of the Pacific Research Institute of
Fisheries and Oceanography (TINRO).

Salvation was mine on the waterfront when a huge freighter, the
Vitus Bering, loomed through the mist.  Its name was a good
omen--Bering, a Dane commissioned by the tsar, was the first to
sail east from Asia to discover America.  The Vitus Bering was
bound for Vladivostok.  My visa was in order, the KGB was
willing, and Capt.  Vladimir Voytovich welcomed me aboard.

Voytovich is 56, a captain for 22 years with the Far East
Shipping Company.  His is the first of a new type of 500-foot
icebreaking ship equipped with two helicopters that deliver cargo
to remote coastal villages.

His regular route takes him north through the Bering Strait and
into the Arctic Ocean to Chaun Bay.  It is one of the world's
most demanding sailing chores, the captain told me.  Savage
storms create massive drifts of ice that grind down from the
North Pole, closing northern waters to conventional shipping for
all but two or three months a year.

"There are more comfortable oceans, but I prefer sailing where
the weather keeps you busy," he said, offering me strong tea
spiked with rose hips.  "To be a seaman, it is necessary to be
romantic.  It is also useful to have good luck." As we sailed out
of the mists into sunlight on a dancing sea, coursing
southwestward across the Gulf of Anadyr and then along the coast
of Kamchatka, I reflected on the fatal lack of luck that attended
the historic voyage of Captain Bering.

He sailed from the Kamchatka port of Petropavlovsk on June 4,
1741, with conflicting guidance from mapmakers as to where the
continent of America might be.  After six weeks of zigzagging,
during which his ship, St.

When the Vitus Bering arrived at Vladivostok, I found a sad
codicil to the old explorer's fatal voyage.  Hidden among other
bones and fossils at TINRO's marine museum was a huge mammalian
skull, one of the few remaining bits of evidence that an animal
called the Steller sea cow ever existed.

This sirenian, weighing as much as 8,000 pounds, was discovered
by a Bavarian scientist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who accompanied
Bering. The naturalist left the only description ever written of
the sea cow.

"These animals love shallow and sandy places along the seashore,
but they spend their time...about the mouths of the gullies and
brooks, the rushing fresh water of which always attracts them in
herds," he wrote.  "They keep the half-grown young in front of
them when pasturing, and are very careful to guard them in the
rear and on the sides when traveling....With the rising tide they
come in so close to the shore that not only did I on many
occasions prod them with a pole or a spear, but sometimes even
stroked their back with my hand."

So easy were they to capture, and so tasty their flesh, that they
were exterminated by 1768--only 27 years later--by Russian
hunters. Like most of man's depredations, this was committed in
ignorance, with a naive belief that nature's resources are
inexhaustible.

Today, TINRO's scientists have joined a worldwide effort to
convince fishery experts and conservationists that current
methods of ecosystem management are almost as naive.

"We can say that nobody in the world yet understands processes in
ocean basins," I was told by Oleg A.  Bulatov, deputy director of
the TINRO science laboratories.  "For seven years, we have
studied not only exploited species, such as pollock, but
unexploited species as well, such as lantern fish, sculpin,
sharks, and skate.

"Our preliminary results estimate the fish biomass in the Bering
at 30 million tons, almost 75 percent in the American zone.  But
we do not know which species increase when another species is
reduced by fishing.

"Managers on both sides often base their conclusions on very weak
data regarding such complex factors as primary productivity of
phytoplankton and the roles played by bacteria, protozoans, and
benthic organisms."

That left me with more questions than answers.  I put some of
them to Bill Aron at NMFS.  "Animals are better oceanographers
than we are," he told me.  "For instance, the Steller sea lion
population collapse started at a time when there was a vast
increase in pollock, their principal food.  Why?  We don't know.
But they are telling us something is happening."

Today sea lions are helping to report their own activities by way
of radios and instrument packages glued to their fur in a
multimillion-dollar government study.

"The radios transmit data to satellites," said Tom Loughlin, of
the NMFS Marine Mammal Laboratory.  "We've learned that in the
breeding season they go 20 to 25 miles offshore to feed.  Their
dives last about two minutes, at depths between 65 and 330 feet.

"The next step will be to monitor fishing within a 20-mile radius
of a rookery, to see what effect it has on population trends."

To learn more, I visited Alaska Department of Fish and Game
biologist Lloyd Lowry, director of the Steller Sea Lion Recovery
Team.

"We are finding that adult females are poorly nourished, so what
is happening near the rookeries may be critical," he said.
"Fishing on spawning shoals of pollock could be particularly
damaging, because the high-calorie roe-bearing fish are a
preferred food for the sea lions late in pregnancy.  If they
don't get the right food at the right time, it may be that they
spontaneously abort."

Neither Loughlin nor Lowry believes that number
crunching--juggling fishing statistics and population
estimates--provides enough information for management.  "You must
have a conceptual model of each creature's relationship to all
the other creatures and to the whole," Dr.  Lowry said.

"Remember, the North Pacific was changed greatly by whaling.
Large whales were very abundant, numbering in the tens of
thousands.  When they disappeared, millions of tons of food was
freed up for pollock, herring, and salmon.  Did that create an
artificially high biomass of forage fishes?  What kind of
ecosystem did we start with?"

Fisheries managers will soon have more information to work with
thanks to a new policy of placing some 600 NMFS observers on
fishing vessels, at a cost of seven to eight million dollars to
the industry, to monitor the catch and bycatch and gather
biological data.

Enforcement of rules will be strengthened.  "Up to now, all we've
required is that fishermen throw the bycatch back," said Russ
Nelson, manager of the observer program.  "Now we have a 'penalty
box' system for excessive bycatch.