I am not advocating that you add whale or seal to your entree options or your seafood case. 

Rather, I am urging you to pay close attention to whale, seal and other marine-mammal issues, because domestic and international policies dealing with marine mammals have a direct bearing on how you do business - from the seafood you serve to the prices you and your customers pay. 

Almost daily, the press or some government agency issues an edict about some fish or shellfish stock deemed to be on shaky grounds. Some are in trouble. Some aren't. 

Incomplete scientific data and so-called "animal welfare" groups eager for headlines create the perception both with your customers and with government regulators that the ocean environment is in bad shape and getting worse by the day. Perceptions become truth, science not withstanding. 

Many factors affect the ocean's bounty. Overfishing is one. But it is not the only pressure on the world's seafood stocks. Weather, pollution, underwater detonations and the oxygen level in the water are others. The effect of whales and seals is another. 

According to the Cetacean Research Institute, whales worldwide consume between three and six times the total annual catch of all commercial fisheries each year. Most whale species are anything but depleted. 

Two million adult and juvenile sperm whales, a million each of smaller minke and pilot whales and tens of hundreds of thousands of most of the other 76 species of cetaceans roam the seas with voracious appetites. 

In the Barents Sea alone, 2 million harp seals each wolf down the equivalent of 1 ton of polar cod, herring and other fish per year. That's 3.3 to 3.5 million tons of seafood, or the annual seafood con-sumption of Germany and Great Britain combined. That's a lot of seafood. 

Our history of "saving" the whales, seals or any critter, one species at a time, is simple and direct but ignores the fact that ecosystems, whether they be aquatic or land-based, are just that: systems. If one part of the system gets out of balance, other species suffer and the ecosystem loses its equilibrium. 
 

The Chesapeake Bay moratorium on striped bass harvesting led to a population explosion of that sleek fish. More stripers vying for food in the bay caused a dietary shift that focused the big fish's attention on baby blue crabs. 

Under single-species conservation schemes, one species wins, one loses. 

Our own economic survival and nature require us to preserve biological diversity if we are to sustain healthy seafood catches. 

But rather than climbing aboard simplistic boycott or moratorium campaigns based on incomplete data and myopically focused on a single species, seafood suppliers and buyers must support and demand more complete research on the health of ocean seafood popula-tions and multi-species management approaches. 

We've saved the world's whale species so well that their thriving numbers are squeezing out truly rare whales, such as the huge blue whale. 

Unless we bring a balanced approach to protecting the environment, we will be left with management schemes that seek to protect parts and not the whole. Ultimately, that will send seafood prices higher and reduce the supply of marketable seafood species.