§1421f National Marine Mammal Tissue Bank and tissue analysis

Summary

The Secretary must create and run a National Marine Mammal Tissue Bank to store, prepare, examine, and keep marine mammal tissue samples. The Secretary must write rules, after getting advice from scientists, vets, animal caretakers, and conservation experts and after public comment, on how to collect, prepare, archive, and quality-check samples. The bank must include samples from unusual mortality events and from other wild sources like animals caught accidentally in commercial fishing, taken for subsistence, biopsies, and other properly collected samples. The Secretary must also, with the Marine Mammal Commission, the Interior Secretary, experts, and public input, write rules for analyzing those tissues using the best available tools to watch health trends. Analyses should measure levels and, when possible, effects of harmful contaminants and track how often and why abnormal lesions or anomalies occur. The Secretary must keep a central database with tissue and health data, including reference information and data on species in unusual mortality events, and must set rules, with public input, for public access to the tissues, analyses, and database.