Description
The US Fish and Wildlife Service, Region 7, Alaska, intends to award a sole source procurement to Southwest Fisheries Science Center to provide analysis of the food habits of Pacific Albatros and cephalopod distribution. The basis of the work will be as follows: To conduct a two-part study on the diets of North Pacific albatrosses; a current analysis based on samples collected over the next three nesting seasons, as well as an analysis of historical data based on samples collected and preserved by the USFWS during 1978-81. This latter sample contains all of the unidentified beaks from the Harrison et al. (1983) study. The study will be for three years to incorporate potential interannual variation. For the current analysis, personnel of the USFWS have already been instructed to collect LAAL and BFAL cough pellets on French Frigate Shoals, Midway Island, Pearl and Hermes Reef, and Kilauea Point during the 2004 nesting season (Beth Flint pers. comm.). Pellets will be collected only when the donor species can be positively identified; each pellet will be individually wrapped in a plastic bag with a data tag indicating date, location and species. We have requested no more than 30 pellets per species per location per year. For STAL samples, Short-tailed Albatross Recovery Team (START) members will collect samples from nesting islands during surveys at the end of the nesting season, when chicks are ready to depart the island or have already left. At the end of the nesting season (July) pellets will be shipped to Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, CA for preliminary sorting; each pellet requires 3-4 h to remove and clean all prey hard parts (comprised almost entirely of squid beaks). Cleaned hard parts will then be shipped to William Walker in Seattle where the prey will be identified, measured, tabulated and (in most cases) the size of the intact prey calculated from published conversion equations. This process requires another 3 h of processing time per pellet, assuming each pellet contains on average 36 cephalopod beaks (as was the case in Pitman et al., in review). For the historical analysis, hard parts from a total of 127 pellets (68 BFAL and 59 LAAL) from 4 separate localities: Laysan Island (91), French Frigate Shoals (15), Kure Atoll (15) and Midway Island (6). These will be analyzed as described above. In order to investigate interannual and geographic variation in prey preferences, we propose to collect samples over three years (2004, 2005 and 2006) and from as many different nesting colonies as possible. All results will be summarized in annual reports that will be completed within 6 months of receiving the final shipment of samples from USFWS each year. This notice of intent is not a request for comptetitive proposals and the Government does not intend to accept proposals received. Award will be made August 6, 2004, following the publication of this notice. See Numbered Note 22.