Differentiating Serious and Non-Serious Injury of Marine Mammals: Report of the Serious Injury Technical Workshop. Held in Seattle, Washington on September 10-13, 2007

摘要

The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) section 117 requires the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to prepare stock assessment reports (SAR) for all stocks of marine mammals that occur in waters under the jurisdiction of the United States. These reports summarize human-caused mortalities and serious injuries to marine mammals by source. In addition, MMPA section 118 requires commercial fisheries to reduce mortality and serious injury of marine mammals to insignificant levels approaching a zero mortality and serious injury rate. This charge requires that NMFS distinguish between injuries that are serious and those that are not serious. NMFS defined serious injury in regulations (50 CFR 229.2) as any injury that will likely result in mortality. However, the MMPA and its legislative history do not provide guidance on how severe an injury must be to qualify as serious. To promote national consistency for interpreting the regulatory definition of serious injury, NMFS convened a workshop in April 1997 to discuss available information related to the impact of injuries to marine mammals incidental to commercial fishing operations. Since 1997, additional information has been collected on human-caused injuries to marine mammals and survival rates of certain individual and/or species of marine mammals. For this reason, NMFS convened the Serious Injury Technical Workshop on September 10-13, 2007, with the primary objectives to: (1) review the recommendations and guidance from the 1997 workshop; (2) review new information obtained since the first workshop; and (3) discuss the use of, and necessary changes to, existing guidance for distinguishing serious from non-serious injuries. The 2007 workshop extended beyond discussions related only to marine mammal-commercial fishery interactions. Although other sources of human-caused injuries were mentioned during the workshop, much of the 2007 workshop discussions focused on types of injuries commonly observed from encounters with vessels and fisheries (e.g., blunt force trauma, penetrating, hidden, and gear and hooking injuries) because these interactions have been examined to the greatest extent.