ANNAPOLIS, Maryland — March 16, 2011 (Saving Seafood) Sponsored by Maryland delegates Peter Murphy and David Rudolph and slated for a public hearing today (March 16) before the House Environmental Matters Committee, HB 1142 proposes to outlaw the manufacturing, selling or distributing a product or product component obtained from the reduction of Atlantic menhaden in the State of Maryland, where commercial menhaden fishing is not legal.
Harvested in Virginia's jurisdiction of the Chesapeake Bay, menhaden is used to manufacture fish oil and fishmeal in Reedville, Virginia. A number of conservation and angler groups contest that commercial harvesting is ecologically destructive to the Chesapeake Bay, as do the bill's sponsors.
Trudee Kondos, Mr. Murphy's legislative aide, says the bill is based on the book "The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America," by Dr. H. Bruce Franklin, an English professor at Rutgers with an expertise in history and a colorful, but non-scientific, background. "We want to highlight the importance of this fish in the Chesapeake Bay," she says. "One way to stand up for this fish is through this ban; the products [menhaden] is used to make can be found elsewhere."
Other fish oil comes from sources that aren't regulated at all and plant-based omega oil products are not comparable to the long chain omega oil products derived from menhaden. And that's just one type of product: were the law to pass, hundreds of products, from animal feed to margarine, would become officially banned in Maryland.
The bill is not expected to pass. "The … bill, however well meaning, is in truth a symbolic gesture, all show and no go," a columnists for TidalFish.com writes. "It will generate conversation about an important ecological issue but will be near impossible to implement."
In fact, the conversation has been ongoing for some time; however, with so many conflicting viewpoints on an already complex issue, it's just not been an easy one to follow. For example, the Menhaden Coalition, among others, claims that fish such as striped bass are suffering as a consequence of declining menhaden. A "fact sheet" from the group contends that "following are warning signs that the low numbers are impacting predators: Surveys in Chesapeake Bay, the primary menhaden nursery, show menhaden now account for less than 8% of the diet of striped bass. Historically, young menhaden have comprised as much as 70% of the prey consumed by adult stripers."
But diet studies are notoriously variable and, in this case, the notion that the standard for striped bass reliance on menhaden for forage is at 70% is unrealistic and misleading. Certainly, individual studies might find a value as high as 70%, but it is not reasonable to assume that striped bass rely upon menhaden for 70% of their diet "historically." The kind and number of prey species consumed by predators varies significantly. Like any number of predatory fish, striped bass are opportunistic foragers, meaning that they hunt until they find suitable prey to eat. One would not expect a striped bass to pass up an Atlantic croaker in search of a menhaden. If a particular study happens to sample a predator that has just been feeding on a large school of menhaden, it would be easy to assume that menhaden is the most important prey for that species, when, in reality, the stomach contents of the sampled fish were affected by the proximity of the predator species to an area with an abundance of menhaden.
Furthermore, populations of striped bass and menhaden do not exactly enjoy a symbiotic relationship. From the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, while menhaden were declining, striped bass populations were recovering tremendously. Regardless of menhaden populations, sufficient forage has been available for striped bass and other predators. Instead, experts believe both striped bass and Atlantic menhaden responded to a climatic regime shift in 1992, which favored striped bass recruitment but not menhaden recruitment. They now believe a new regime shift has begun, this time seeing striped bass recruitment and population abundance declining over the past three or four years while menhaden recruitment has been increasing.
It is also widely believed that the success of menhaden recruitment is far more dependent on environmental conditions — weather, water quality and atmospheric pressure – than on anything else, including restrictions on commercial fishing. Stocks are routinely determined to be healthy. Menhaden are a very renewable resource; one female menhaden can produce as many as 400,000 eggs at a time.
"Intuitively, it makes sense that less fishing means more menhaden," says National Marine Fisheries Services biologist Joseph Smith. "But it doesn't work that way. Based on years of data, there doesn't seem to be a very good relationship between the number of spawners and the number of juveniles."
Yet frustration has caused some interested parties to push for rapid action, stating fears that the menhaden population will collapse if something is not done "right now." However, stock assessment have shown that the spawning potential of the population at the current level is sufficient to ensure continuation of the population.
Some insiders find it contradictory that a bill such as the one being proposed today originates from legislators in a state that prohibits commercial fishing for the menhaden reduction industry yet allows menhaden to be fished for bait.