July 25, 2012 — The following is an excerpt from a Greenpeace petition on Atlantic menhadem.
The most important fish in the sea need your help. Last November, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) responded to scientific evidence of a severe decline in menhaden—and more than 90,000 comments from people like you—and took a historic first step to help the recovery of Atlantic menhaden. The commission initiated a plan to significantly increase the number of menhaden left in the ocean, a move that would benefit and protect sport fish, seabirds, whales, and thousands of fishing-related businesses and bird and whale watching operations that depend on these fish.
There is still no limit on how many menhaden are taken from the Atlantic Ocean. Every year, hundreds of millions of these fish are hauled in and ground up, reduced to fish meal and oil for use as dietary supplements, fertilizer, and feed for farm animals, pets, and aquaculture.
Don’t let the menhaden industry derail the plan to restore this critically important fish. The ASMFC needs to hear from you! Urge the commission to make good on its commitment to restore the menhaden population.
Analysis: On July 25, Greenpeace published a petition, “Keep Menhaden Recovery On Track,” advocating for officials at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) to implement new regulations on Atlantic menhaden. The text is virtually identical to a menhaden petition published on July 23 by Peter Baker, Director of the Northeast Fisheries Program for the Pew Environment Group, and both petitions contain the same misleading arguments about the menhaden fishery. The result is an exaggerated view of the Atlantic menhaden population that is more dire than the reality, and one that minimizes the many aspects of the menhaden science and management process that are currently in dispute.
The petitions contain several inaccuracies and selective quoting of facts. For example, they state, “overfishing has occurred in 32 of the last 54 years,” but fails to mention that in the last 15 years, overfishing of menhaden has only occurred twice, most recently in 2008 by only .04%. Similarly, they neglect to mention that the menhaden stock is at its target abundance (the number of eggs being produced by the population), which is almost twice the level it would need to be in order for the stock to be considered overfished.
In the petitions, the organizations also ask the public to demand that menhaden management be based on the 2012 menhaden update stock assessment. Not mentioned is that because of issues such as a pattern of contradictory historical population estimates, and incorrect assumptions about the age distribution of fish caught by the fishery, the members of the ASMFC Menhaden Technical Committee have deemed that assessment to be severely flawed and not reliable for management purposes. They also neglect to include the results of a recent aerial survey of the northern range of the menhaden population in the North Atlantic, which indicates that the coast-wide menhaden stock may be twice as large as the ASMFC is currently estimating.