NEW YORK — December 13, 2012 — Fishery protection groups are appealing to the commission to impose a catch limit off the mid-Atlantic that would reduce the current take of menhaden by as much as 50 percent. Decisions by the commission, created by Congress, have the force of law.
For Omega Protein, that’s a major threat, said Ben Landry, a company spokesman. The company supports 300 employees, most of them fishermen as their fathers or even grandfathers were before them, he said. A 50 percent cut would force the company’s plant in Reedville, Va., “to shut down tomorrow,” he said.
“The last thing we want to do is bury our heads in the sand if there’s really an issue,” Mr. Landry said. He said the demand for a 50 percent reduction was based on “a lot of cloudy science,” adding that the most recent stock assessment of the menhaden had produced “unreliable results.” Omega Protein is willing to accept a 16 percent reduction in the catch, he added.
Erik Williams, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center who was involved in this year’s menhaden stock count, said there were some loose ends in the data.
Time pressures meant that the stock assessment team had to update the information quickly, leaving some uncertainties in its analysis. Its members advised that a more thorough investigation be carried out.
“The population is definitely not in its most healthy condition,” Dr. Williams said, “but the problem is that we don’t know where it is according to what we call benchmarks” that would size up the menhaden’s status more precisely.
All the same, he said, the call for a strict catch limit is based not so much on the stock assessment data, which focuses strictly on the menhaden’s status, as it is on the functioning of the ecosystem as a whole. Dr. Williams said that ecosystem data is not particularly solid, either, however, although the fisheries commission has determined that the menhaden is being overfished.
Read the full story in the New York Times