Columns on a giant mammal and a small fish generated significant interest the past year or so. Both subjects are worth updating.
Politics of menhaden
As I wrote in a February column, menhaden are an oily prey species that filter seawater as they feed and form a crucial link in the coastal marine food chain. Striped bass, bluefish, sea birds and mammals gorge on menhaden as they migrate from New England to the Chesapeake Bay and beyond.
But menhaden also are a political prisoner, held hostage by Virginia's General Assembly. The GA allows the Virginia Marine Resources Commission to manage every other saltwater species but menhaden.
A company called Omega Protein, the only player in the menhaden "reduction" industry, contributes handsomely to Virginia politicians, who reward the company by keeping "management" of the fish firmly in the hands of the GA, not the VMRC. Houston-based Omega has a processing plant in Reedville, uses giant boats and spotter planes to suck up huge quantities of menhaden and turns them into products, including fish oil supplements.
But there are storm clouds on the horizon for Omega and the GA. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), which has jurisdiction over the coastal menhaden stock, has determined overfishing is occurring. In fact, menhaden numbers are at a historic low. The spawning potential of the existing stock is only 8 percent of an unfished stock.
In order to rebuild the stock, the ASMFC has proposed establishing a spawning potential threshold of 15 percent, and is considering a range of possible spawning potential targets: 20, 30 or 40 percent. The ASMFC will convene in November to select the target number, and to achieve it, it likely will have to set harvest limits, impacting Omega Protein and the smaller bait industry.
And even though Virginia's GA manages menhaden in state waters, John Bull of the VMRC said "Virginia would have to comply, or the Feds could order a moratorium and shut down the entire fishery. They have that authority and they've used that threat before."
For years, our GA has played politics with a small but very important fish. Depending on what happens in November, those days could be numbered.
Read the full article at the Richmond Times Dispatch.
Analysis: The article is correct in stating that as of 2008, the last year of the most recent stock assessment, the maximum spawning potential (MSP) of the menhaden population was around 8%. However, the article implies that the MSP level is so low that it is jeopardizing the stock. This is technically not true; the MSP level for menhaden over the entire 55 year time series of data has rarely been over 10%. Even when recruitment was at very high levels in the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, MSP levels fluctuated between 5% and 8%, showing definitively that menhaden fecundity (egg producing capability) is strong enough to replace the population and more at an MSP level of 8%. While the assessment found slight overfishing in 2008 (.4% above the threshold), the population is not overfished, meaning that the assessment concludes that menhaden egg production is high enough (198% above the threshold) to replenish the stock.