Page Eight Jonathan Weisgal} January 21, 1982 such as tuna and mackerel, the roof fish inhabit specific niches in the atoll's lagoon, and the student was studying the interplay between fish niche and fish community in Pacific atolls. . There are two studies of fish population at Bikini, both of which are relevant here. Those studies by Leonard P. Schultz are titled "The Biology of Bikini Atol] With Special Reference to the Fishes" (Smithsonian Institution Annual Reports for 1947: 301-16, Washington, D.C., GPO, 1948) and "Fishes of the Marshall and Mariana Islands" (U.S. National Museum Bulletin 202, Washington, D.C., 1953). In the 1953 study, Schultz states that “In the biological cycling of materials there is not only an abundance of organisms but also @ wide variety of species--some 700 among the fishes alone--so that whatever is not utilized by one isquicklytaken by another." (Quoted from Jack Tobin's doctoral dissertation, "The Resettlement of the Enewetak People: A Study of a Displaced Community in the Marshall Islands," 1967, University of California at Berkeley, page 54.) While on Utirik between the years 1975 and 1977, I recall that the islanders regularly ate between 30 and 40 different species of roof fish. Many of these fish--like the parrotfish--subsist by eating coral, and it is my guess that certain radionuclides (e.g., strontium-90) probably got recycled in the man-environment foodchain complex. If this hypothesis is correct, the Marshallese are in trouble: no lesssthan one-third of all the fish I ate for two years on Utirik were parrotfish, and many of the others were likewise coraleaters. In this regard, I direct you to a study of ocosystem contamination at Bikini and Enewetak by researchers from the fish laboratory at the University of Washington at Seattle. This study is titled: “Polonium-210 and plutonium-239, plutonium-240 in the biological and water samples from the Bikini and Enewetak atolls," and appears in Nature, volume 255, May 22, 1975, pp. 321-23. It is rather curious why the researchers of this study--who were funded by the DOE-restricted their analysis to only the aforementioned isotopes, while they completely ignored cesium-137, strontium-90, cobalt-60, americium-241, etc. The authors did mention, however, that "The overall result indicates that inside the lagoon the radioactivity values of plutonium were more variable than those of polonium-210 (page 323, emphasis added)." This statement leads me to suspect that we are still shooting in the dark when we discuss possible radionuclide uptake for the people of Bikini, should they decide to return home. "5S, Restrictions on access to Bikini and compliance with prescribed diet. Your experiences in the Marshall Islands would be useful in this regard." Response: While in the Marshalls early last year as a consultant for the Marshall Islands Litigation Project, I interviewed several people from Utirik who recounted their experiences after their evacuation following the 1954 "Bravo" hydrogen test. Most of the people from Utirik told me how they were instructed not to eat the local foods from Utirik when they returned home after their threemonth evacuation to Kwajalein. The following excerpt from an OO (cont'd.) AM, ee