March 26, 2012 – The public relations battle between ocean environmental activists and organizers of a March 21 fishermen’s rally in Washington, D.C., flared again Monday, when critics of the rally complained the crowd included crewmen from Omega Protein — the industrial menhaden fleet that has long been a target of recreational fishing and conservation groups.
“For our nation’s anglers to have to learn that a group who falsely claims to represent them is teaming up with ‘public enemy No. 1’ is a disgrace,” Matt Tinning of the Marine Fish Conservation Network said in a prepared statement, criticizing the Recreational Fishing Alliance. “RFA’s contempt for the health of our recreational fisheries is an affront to everything we’ve worked so hard to achieve.”
“The Recreational Fishing Alliance leadership owes our anglers a full explanation and immediate apology.”
“We owe no one an apology,” said Jim Donofrio of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, a primary organizer of last week’s rally. “We still stand against Omega’s reduction fishing, and we could not keep them from attending.”
It’s misleading to suggest that rally organizers endorse every group that showed up at Upper Senate Park that day, said Jim Hutchinson Jr. — who noted that animal rights activists with People for the Ethical Treament of Animals attended, too.
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In his 2007 book, “The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America,” Rutgers University professor H. Bruce Franklin tied the industrial harvests of menhaden not only to less food for birds and fish, but to ecological disruption. Menhaden filter-feed on microscopic plants and their numbers are far below historic highs, Franklin wrote
Read the full article at the Asbury Park Press.
Analysis: The otherwise well-balanced article cites H. Bruce Franklin’s book The Most Important Fish in the Sea, and its claim that a lack of menhaden is responsible for deteriorating ecological conditions in the Chesapeake Bay. This claim does not take into account fisheries science on the health of the menhaden stock or evidence that suggests menhaden’s contribution to water quality is negligible.
As the article documnets, critics of the menhaden reduction industry allege “it takes too many fish from the base of the ocean food chain.” Franklin makes a similar claim, where he writes that the reduction industry “is massacring juvenile fish,” and that this is causing a collapse in the menhaden population (The Most Important Fish in the Sea, pg. 135). The scientific data collected on the menhaden fishery does not support these claims. The last Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) stock assessment, released in 2010, concluded that menhaden were not overfished. Previous ASMFC assessments reached similar conclusions; with overfishing having only occurred once in the last ten years, there is no significant pattern of the reduction industry overexploiting the fishery in recent years.
The article also mentions Franklin’s claim that menhaden, as filter feeders, clean the Bay by removing plankton and algae from its waters. Franklin writes that menhaden “are huge consumers of phytoplankton, that is, algae and other drifting bits of vegetable matter,” and that “"the health of our East Coast bays and estuaries…depends on these small fish" (The Most Important Fish in the Sea, pg. 21). However, the rate that menhaden consume phytoplankton and their contribution to water quality is not universally agreed upon. Several studies have shown that how much phytoplankton menhaden eat will vary with age, and a recent Virginia Institute of Marine Science study found that menhaden contribute very little to overall water quality.