Comments on the NOAA Scientific Panel Report by :

The report describes discrepancies between current and historical carrying capacity for the SRKW, but fails to discuss options for increasing current carrying capacity. The report also appears to be overwhelmingly focused on broad demographic associations between annual SRKW population growth and fish abundance that occur over a relatively long time scale. Too little attention is paid to changes occurring over shorter time scales, including key transitional pinch-points of salmon runs and availability facing the SRKW population over each year. The panel rightly recommended the need to focus on more sensitive tools to monitor nutritional and associated impacts on SRKW population growth. However, again, their only specific recommendation was for photogrammetric measures, which occur over a relatively long time scale. They dismissed the use of more short-term physiological analyses from scat, arguing that hormones are confounded because they have multiple functions. However, as argued below, the multiple functions of these hormones should instead be viewed as strengths; their measurement in properly designed studies allows investigators to observe how physiological levels change over the short-term with the various environmental pressures the SRKW are responding to. Such short-term temporal changes are particularly conducive for designing and evaluating mitigation.