My name is Elliott Norse. I am President of Marine Conservation Biology Institute. MCBI is a nonprofit organization with headquarters in Redmond WA and offices in Washington DC. Its purpose is advancing the multidisciplinary science of marine conservation biology. We hold scientific workshops and symposia, including the first Symposium on Marine Conservation Biology, and write in the scientific, policy and popular literature.

I welcome you to the Pacific Northwest, a region that was home to the world's most remarkable anadromous fish populations and fisheries. Now many salmon runs are extinct and many more are endangered, but this region has experts who are better equipped to address their disappearance, and hence, I will defer. But I have been interested in endangerment and extinction in marine species for nearly all my career. Eighteen years ago, at the State Department/Agency for International Development Strategy Conference on Biological Diversity, I presented an unpublished paper I had written about endangerment and extinction in marine invertebrates. It noted that virtually all protection for marine species went to marine mammals, birds and reptiles (tetrapod vertebrates), that no non-estuarine fish, no marine invertebrate and no marine plant had been protected under the Endangered Species Act. It further outlined the belief of Dr. William Aron, who then headed NOAA's Office of Marine Mammals and Endangered Species, that marine species are essentially "extinction-proof" by virtue of the sea's vastness, the inadequacy of marine exploration, marine organisms' great fecundity and the prevalence of planktonic dispersal. His view actually echoed a long-established belief that stretches back to Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and Thomas Huxley.

In 1996, when I was finally in a position to learn more, I held a workshop on Endangerment and Extinction in the Sea with 16 eminent marine scientists1Bsystematists, ecologists, biogeographers, geneticists and paleontologistsB from Australia, Panama, USA and UK. From this has come a paper titled "Historic extinctions in the sea" that will appear later this year in Annual Review of Ecology & Systematics 30 by James T. Carlton, Jonathan Geller, Marjorie L. Reaka-Kudla and me. By happenstance, Callum M. Roberts and Julie P. Hawkins have just published a paper titled "Extinction risk in the sea" in Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14:241-246. These two papers conclude, quite independently, that marine species are not "extinction-proof." The Carlton et al. paper documents species that have disappeared, and the Roberts & Hawkins paper examines factors that predispose species to vulnerability. But then again, it doesn't take a profound thinker to realize that the fossil record is replete with marine species that have become extinct, and that, if it happened before the advent of humankind, it could much more easily happen now that we are altering the biosphere on a massive scale.

Most remarkable is thatBother than tetrapod vertebrates and anadromous or estuarine fishesBimperiled marine species have largely slipped through NOAA's net. There is now just one truly marine fish on the Endangered or Threatened Species lists: the totoaba. There is just one marine plant: Johnson's seagrass. And there are still no marine invertebrates. I suspect that a carefully planned research program focused on finding marine species in peril would uncover many that would benefit from ESA protection. More generally, a comprehensive approach to research an d management throughout NOAA could identify potentially harmful activitiesBwhether related to fisheries management, recreation in National Marine Sanctuaries or other managed activitiesBand help avoid endangerment in the future. Current research and management efforts among NOAA's line offices appear separate and uncoordinated. This lack of coordination can result in agency activities at cross-purposes with one another.

The barndoor skate illustrates this point. In January 1999 MCBI held another workshop, called Conserving an Imperiled Fish, the Barndoor Skate. The participants 2 came from Canada, USA and UK to examine all that is known about this large elasmobranch and other closely related species with similar population parameters. Among their conclusions:

1. Based upon research surveys carried out by the American and Canadian governments, the barndoor skate was widespread and abundant in the 1950s and early 1960s. Since then it has been virtually eliminated from much of its former range. Its population has decreased at least 90-99%.

2. It has been difficult to assess the biological status of barndoor skate or any other skate species from commercial data because different fishing gear have been used over time and fisheries landings have often aggregated catches of all skate species. Combining these data masked the steep decline of barndoor skates as other, smaller skate species increased. However, the barndoor skate population decline from research surveys since the 1950s and 1960s is unmistakable.

3. Based on life history data for similar skate species, there is strong reason to believe that barndoor skates are slow-growing, long-lived organisms with low reproductive output that attain sexual maturity at an advanced age (an estimated 10 or more years). This makes them very vulnerable to fishing.

Within weeks of the meeting, two organizations petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to list the barndoor skate under the ESA. Clearly it is in urgent need of protection, yet its endangerment was not detected by any US or Canadian government agency; it was discovered by scientists in universities working with virtually no dedicated funding, using NOAA data that NOAA had apparently overlooked. Any systematic search for species in trouble would likely have identified this inherently vulnerable species at least 20 years ago. Commercial fishingBan activity whose consequences are supposed to be regulated by NOAABhas pushed this inherently vulnerable species toward extinction without anyone in NOAA seeing what was happening.

The white abalone similarly has been neglected by NOAA. In 1997 MCBI gathered a group of scientists and conservationists 3 to examine the status and plan the recovery of the white abalone. Although the white abalone has planktonic larvae, commercial fishing had reduced the population about 99.99% since about 1970. MCBI provided seed money to establish an ex-situ breeding public-private partnership, and the Principal Investigators were then able to get a larger Kennedy-Saltonstall grant to do this work. The White Abalone Workgroup has met on a number of occasions since then, and has grown to include more active participants from the National Park Service, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and University of California-Santa Barbara. Earlier this year, MCBI led a group of conservation and diving nonprofit organizations in petitioning NMFS to list the white abalone as endangered. As with the barndoor skate, despite NOAA's legislative mandate and the means at its disposal, it was not NOAA that searched for species imperiled by activities that it regulates. NOAA left that job to others.

These two cases lead to an uncomfortable conclusion, and I am going to ask you to bear with my candor in stating it: NOAA's scientific research on marine life is geared primarily to producing meat, not to conserving biological diversity. NOAA is the only agency with the mandate and the means to detect the endangerment of marine species and to stop them from becoming extinct, but NOAA is two decades behind other federal agencies (such as the US Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service and the USDA Forest Service) in embracing maintaining biodiversity as its first conservation goal. NOAA appears to be preoccupied with other tasks and other constituencies that it considers more important. It has failed to coordinate its research and management activities to prevent future extinctions. In my view, this indicates woefully misplaced priorities and poor management. Marine species are being endangered on your watch, but you're not watching. It is time for NOAA to catch up with scientists in academia, conservation nonprofit organizations and other federal and state agencies with an interest in conserving marine biodiversity to fulfill its trust to the American people by taking an active role in identifying species that merit protection. As our nation's leading agency on the marine realm, it is time for NOAA to exercise leadership by using its staff scientists and helping scientists in other institutions to fulfill its obligations under the Endangered Species Act.

1 Participants in Endangerment and Extinction in the Sea workshop:

Brian W. Bowen, BEECS Genetic Analysis Core, University of Florida, Alachua FL
James T. Carlton, Williams College-Maritime Studies Program, Mystic CT
Kerry B. Clark, Department of Biological Sciences, Florida Technical University, Melbourne FL
Robert K. Cowen, Marine Sciences Research Center, State University of New York, Stony Brook NY
Paul Dayton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA
Daphne Gail Fautin, Department of Systematics and Ecology, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS
Jonathan Geller, Department of Biological Sciences, University of North Carolina, Wilmington NC
Dennis Hedgecock, Bodega Marine Laboratory, Bodega Bay CA
Gene R. Huntsman, National Marine Fisheries Service, Beaufort NC
Jeremy B.C. Jackson, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama)
Georgina Mace, Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London UK
Elliott A. Norse, Center for Marine Conservation, Redmond WA
Ronald C. Phillips, Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Richland WA
Winston F. Ponder, Division of Invertebrate Zoology, Australian Museum, Sydney NSW, Australia
Katherine Ralls, Smithsonian Institution National Zoo, Washington DC
Marjorie Reaka-Kudla, Dept. of Zoology, University of Maryland, College Park MD
Kaustuv Roy, Dept. of Biology, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

2 Participants in the Conserving an Imperiled Fish, the Barndoor Skate workshop:

Peter J. Auster, National Undersea Research Center, University of Connecticut, Groton CT
Larry B. Crowder, Duke University Marine Laboratory, Beaufort NC
Les Kaufman, Boston University Marine Program, Boston MA
John A Musick, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Gloucester Point VA
Ransom Myers, Dalhousie University, Halifax NS
Elliott A. Norse, Marine Conservation Biology Institute, Redmond WA
Joshua Sladek Nowlis, Center for Marine Conservation, San Francisco CA
John D. Reynolds, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, York UK
Fred M. Serchuk, National Marine Fisheries Service NE Fisheries Science Center, Woods Hole MA
Kathy Sosebee, National Marine Fisheries Service NE Fisheries Science Center, Woods Hole MA

3 Founders of the White Abalone Workgroup:

James T. Carlton, Williams College-Maritime Studies Program, Mystic CT
Paul K. Dayton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla CA
Gary Davis, National Park Service Channel Island National Park, Ventura CA
Rodney Fujita, Environmental Defense Fund, Oakland CA
Peter Haaker, California Department of Fish and Game, Long Beach CA
Amy Mathews-Amos, Marine Conservation Biology Institute, Washington DC
Tom McCormick, Proteus SeaFarms International, Ojai CA
Elliott A. Norse, Marine Conservation Biology Institute, Redmond WA
Dan Richards, National Park Service Channel Island National Park, Ventura CA
Aaron Tinker, Marine Conservation Biology Institute, Redmond WA
Thomas Okey, Center for Marine Conservation, San Francisco CA