October 18, 2012 — For centuries, probably millennia, the small, oily fish known as Atlantic menhaden have been the protein-filled food of choice for striped bass and many other large species in our waters. Fishermen call them pogeys or bunker, often using them as bait to entice stripers to their lines. Menhaden were once so abundant that early Americans spoke of them swimming in schools upwards of 25 miles long. Today, more menhaden are pulled from the sea — between a quarter and half a billion pounds a year — than any other fish in the continental U.S., primarily to be ground up into fish meal for aquaculture and fish oil for vitamin supplements.
Eighty per cent of those menhaden are netted by a single Virginia-based company, Omega Protein, the last of the “reduction industry” fleet. And the toll has been huge. Since 1983, the fish’s numbers have declined by a staggering 88 per cent.
Which means that the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, where menhaden play a crucial role as a filter feeder on algae, is suffering. And that increasing numbers of emaciated and bacterially-diseased striped bass are going hungry. And that bait fishermen, who provide menhaden for lobster pots and anglers, are hurting economically.
That’s the message being sounded at a series of public hearings currently being held in states across the Eastern seaboard, leading toward a Dec. 14 meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) where stronger regulations on the allowable catch of menhaden are finally being considered. On Tuesday night in Bourne, some 30 residents came to voice their concerns and listen to Massachusetts fisheries officials describe “a sense of urgency.” This was somewhat heartening, considering that the ASMFC has long resisted taking any action that would affect Omega Protein’s bottom line.
Unfortunately, the options on the table didn’t include any area closures to protect menhaden during their spawning season. All who spoke at the hearing agreed that better monitoring is needed of what’s been called the most important fish in the sea. But the ASMFC’s scientific number-crunchers, who admit that overfishing is occurring, still won’t come out and state flatly that the menhaden are definitely being overfished. They say they’re uncertain of the data in their latest stock assessment model, thus making recommendations of specific catch reductions problematic in achieving their “rebuilding targets.”
Read the full story at the Vineyard Gazette
Analysis: In his op-ed, “Menhaden Harvest as Fish Oil Jeopardizes Ocean Food Chain,” Striper Wars author, Dick Russell, writes that “menhaden are in such dire straights as to threaten the future of the entire Atlantic ecosystem.” Mr. Russell reaches this conclusion through the selective editing of the most currently available scientific information on menhaden. Considering all of the available evidence reveals a significantly different picture that is much less extreme than Mr. Russell’s alarmist portrayal.
When Mr. Russell writes that, “since 1983, the fish’s numbers have declined by a staggering 88 percent,” he fails to provide adequate context for this statistic. Because Mr. Russell starts to chart the decline in 1983, he misses the fluctuations in menhaden biomass that have occurred over the 50-plus years of available data. These fluctuations are based on the strength of menhaden recruitment (the number of menhaden that are born), with current biomass levels similar to those seen in the late 1960s, when biomass was lower. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw several years of especially strong recruitment, followed by years of high biomass.
The decline that Mr. Russell cites is part of an alternating cycle of strong and weak recruitment, which is heavily influenced by environmental factors. The relationship between menhaden and climate is recognized by NOAA, which, on its Menhaden Fact Page, states, “menhaden recruitment appears to be independent of fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass, indicating environmental factors may be the defining factor in the production of good year classes.” The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) similarly concluded in its 2010 stock assessment that fluctuations in menhaden abundance may be “almost entirely driven by non-fishery sources.”
Similarly, writing that the ASMFC “still won’t come out and state flatly that menhaden are definitely being overfished” sidesteps an important debate over the current menhaden science. Menhaden are not currently considered overfished by the ASMFC, as concluded in both the 2010 and 2012 assessments. However, not much else is clear about the exact status of the stock, due to widely recognized flaws with the 2012 assessment. These flaws include routine overestimations of fishing mortality and underestimations of population size. The flaws were so severe that the ASMFC’s Menhaden Technical Committee rejected the 2012 assessment as unfit for management advice. During the ongoing ASMFC public comment sessions on menhaden, it is important for the public to recognize that the exact status of the menhaden stock is unknown, with the last reliable data on the fishery collected in 2008 for the 2010 assessment.
Mr. Russell also overstates the ecological role of menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay, claiming that, because of menhaden’s “crucial role as a filter feeder on algae,” commercial fishing of menhaden is harming the Bay’s ecosystem. However, recent studies have called that role into question. In a 2010 study, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) at the College of William and Mary concluded that menhaden, rather than feeding on algae, feed mostly on zooplankton, and that their contribution to improving water quality is negligible.
Mr. Russell advocates for steep and immediate cuts in the commercial menhaden catch. However, given the lack of current data on the fishery, as well as the conclusion by the last reliable assessment that menhaden are not overfished, this prescription would have unclear benefits for conservation, while inflicting measurable harm on the reduction fishery, which provides over 300 jobs and $80 million in economic output, as well as the bait fishery, which is a significant source of bait for lobstermen in Maine and other New England fisheries.