VEMCO Telemetry Tags and Receivers

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Eastern Region Acquisitions Division-Kansas City office intends to award, on a sole source basis, under the authority of FAR 13.106-1(b)(1), with Vemco, Inc for the purchase of V16 Telemetry Tags and VR2W Coded Acoustic Receivers (69Hz) with Bluetooth. The NAICS code for this action is 334290. A sources sought notice was posted to FedBizOpps on July 1, 2011 and closed on July 14, 2011. No responsive responses were received. The Gulf of Mexico sturgeon ("Gulf sturgeon," Acipenser oxyrinchus desotoi) was listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1995. This status was a result of population decline due to heavy fishing mortality in the early twentieth century, as well as probable habitat loss in its historic range. More recently, the 2009 Gulf Sturgeon 5-Year Plan brought forward objectives for this species: 1) to prevent further reduction of existing wild populations of Gulf sturgeon within the range of the subspecies, 2) to establish population levels that would allow delisting of the Gulf sturgeon by management units, and 3) to establish a self-sustaining population that could withstand directed fishing pressure within management units. However, a draft report of the status of the Gulf sturgeon (Pine, in prep) found that trends in abundance were unreliable due to "low recapture rates and sparse data." Thus, based on the current information available, data do not exit to test objectives of the 5-Year Plan. The 2009 Gulf Sturgeon Working Group agreed that several research objectives needed to be set forth and met in order to fulfill the data needs of future assessments. The primary objective was to obtain reliable estimates of natural mortality (M) and abundance throughout the range of the Gulf sturgeon. A Sampling Protocol Meeting was organized and hosted by NMFS. The focus of this multi-year project is to facilitate these objectives by standardization of data collection methodology, and to collect the additional life history information that is lacking for this species. In order to attain these objectives, a standardized protocol for estimating M was implemented, in which VEMCO VR2 W receivers will be used as "gates" at the mouths of the seven major rivers defined as critical habitat for this species. Each year for five years, five Gulf sturgeon from each river will be Implanted with VEMCO VR1 6 transmitters. To maintain the standardization of the project, and to maintain necessary consistency across the timeframe of this project, the Gulf Sturgeon Working Group decided to use only VEMCO receivers and transmitters. Because VEMCO receivers are proprietary, other types of transmitters may not be detected by the VEMCO receivers, thus allowing the Gulf sturgeon to leave the rivers undetected. Reliable tag detections are crucial for the success of this project; therefore, VEMCO receivers and tags are necessary. If the government cannot purchase VEMCO products to continue this monitoring program, we will lose data from previously purchased equipment because no other vendor will be able to provide the compatibility to those data that have already been recorded.