They’ve been called “the most important fish in the sea.” Small, silvery, and packed with nutritional value, menhaden are filter feeders that consume plankton and in turn are food for striped bass and other important fish, as well as marine mammals and sea birds. They are in effect a critical link in the marine food web.
But in 32 of the past 54 years, menhaden have been overfished, and they are now at their lowest level on record. Most of the harvest today is taken by Omega Protein, Inc.—a corporation based in Houston, Texas, which capitalizes off of menhaden’s nutritional value by running a fish reduction plant out of small-town Reedville, Virginia. Omega Protein’s catch makes up 80 percent of the East Coast catch, resulting in more than 150,000 tons per year of menhaden, which are then cooked, ground up, processed into oil and meal to be used for fish and livestock feed, pet food, paints, cosmetics, and dietary supplements.
“This is enough to make Reedville, Virginia, annually one of the top three ports in the whole country, including Alaska, in terms of tonnage landed,” says Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Fisheries Director and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) Commissioner Bill Goldsborough. “And most of these ecologically critical fish are removed from Chesapeake Bay waters and the ocean waters just outside the Bay’s mouth.”
Read the rest of the article at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation Blog.
Analysis: While overfishing of menhaden has occured in the past, recent assessments have concluded that it is not currently occuring. However, overfishing is only one influence on the health and size of the menhaden population; other environmental factors, including water temperature and levels of predation, also play an important role. Current menhaden fecundity levels are at their target, and egg levels are high enough that they should be able to replace menhaden caught during reduction fishing, which is at the mortality threshold. Weak recruitment would then indicate factors other than reduction fishing influencing menhaden population size.