At the SeaLife Center in Seward, one study involves feeding captive sea lions a series of diets corresponding to what sea lions ate in the Gulf of Alaska before the decline, in the gulf after the decline, and in southeastern Alaska where there's been no decline. In the Kodiak harbor, the salmon seine fleet was loading supplies and heading out for an opening the next day, and schools of inch-long smolt darkened the water. I stopped to talk with a halibut longliner who was, with his family, cleaning his boat and putting away gear. He was not a fan of the trawlers. Just because some oddball thing like a bryozoan grows on the bottom doesn't mean it's not valuable in the environment.
Reasonable fishermen have to be ecologically sensitive.
The health of the habitat is critical to us. Before leaving town I stopped in at the new Alutiiq Museum, which preserves and shares the culture of the original people of the region. The fishing nets woven from porpoise sinew, the harpoon points, the sealskin boots, the baleen baskets, the fur parka decorated with puffin beaks-nearly everything in the physical culture was used to wrest a living from the sea, was a product of the sea, or both. Sea lions, aside from being an important source of meat and oil, supplied the hides needed to cover Alutiiq kayaks. Their long whiskers adorned hunters' hats.