The following is an excerpt from the Public Trust Project story:
April 30, 2012 – Nine members of Congress — five Republicans and four Democrats — have urged the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) to consider corporate-funded research in assessing Atlantic menhaden, a forage fish vital to the Atlantic ecosystem.
In a letter to the ASMFC, the politicians expressed concerns that the agency has not included the “latest information” in its most recent menhaden stock assessment.
The letter refers to information from an aerial survey conducted by University of New England scientist James Sulikowski, who flew in a spotter plane for 50 hours last fall looking for schools of menhaden in what has historically been the fish’s northern range, from Long Island to Portland, Maine.
Sulikowski’s flyover observations were sponsored by Omega Protein, a company that removes a quarter of a billion pounds of menhaden from Atlantic waters each year – the largest industrial harvester of the fish by orders of magnitude. The company has argued that menhaden stock assessments have not adequately accounted for menhaden schools in the north. According to Omega, that might have skewed the results of the most recent assessment, which showed menhaden abundance down 88 percent in the last 25 years and that overfishing had occurred in the majority of the last 50.
The letter suggests that Omega Protein is using a time-tested corporate tactic: If the existing science doesn’t support your bottom line, fund some of your own. And then get Congress to support it. The nine elected signatories seem more comfortable aligning with monied interests than with rigorous, science-based policy making.
The letter, dated April 9th, 2012, calls on the ASMFC to address the work of Dr. Sulikowski and other “independent scientists” in this year’s assessment of the menhaden population.
Read the full story at the Public Trust Project.
Analysis: In its article Congressmen Push Use of Corporate Science in Fisheries Management, the Public Trust Project criticized a recent letter issued by nine Congressmen for asking the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) to consider an aerial study of older menhaden in northern waters from New Jersey to Maine, which lie outside the traditional bounds of the reduction fishery. The study was conducted by Dr. James Sulikowski. Dr. Sulikowski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of New England, and has a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of New Hampshire.
The Public Trust Project’s disdain for the research and its Congressional support was not due to the study’s validity, but rather that it was funded through a grant provided by the reduction fishery. Because of this, the Public Trust Project dismisses Dr. Sulikowski’s work as “corporate-funded research”. In doing so, they ignore the value of the study and imply that the researchers had an industry-slanted bias without offering evidence to support that claim.
The Public Trust Project correctly notes that, in order for the results of the aerial survey to be useful to future stock assessments, it will have to be part of a multi-year survey that includes both aerial and boat-based data. But by making unfounded attacks on the existing data, the Public Trust Project does not advance the cause of better fisheries science.
Currently, the menhaden stock assessment receives most of its data from the fishery, and as a result looks at menhaden in a particular geographic range, from Virginia to New Jersey. The fish in this area range from age 0-3. There is little information available on the fish that school outside the range, and as a result fish older than age 3 are not factored in the assessment, even though older menhaden are known to migrate north. This could lead to an underestimation of stock size and spawning, as fish over age 3, which are mostly outside the traditional survey area, tend to lay proportionally more eggs.
The goal of the survey was to provide a more complete scientific understanding of menhaden than is currently present in the stock assessment. The aerial survey flew for 50 hours, and was supported by boats catching samples for two days of the survey. The survey estimates they found 17 million pounds of menhaden, and that a large percentage of them, close to 70%, were ages 4 and 5. These results, while not definitive or comprehensive, demonstrate that there is a part of the menhaden population that is not being adequately accounted for in current menhaden assessments.
The Public Trust Project writes, “Omega Protein is using a time-tested corporate tactic: If the existing science doesn’t support your bottom line, fund some of your own.” However, the Public Trust Project failed to produce any evidence in the article to prove the allegation that the $250,000 grant provided by Omega Protein to fund the study biased the results in any way. The article assumes, again without evidence, that a major industry stakeholder would have no interest in accurate scientific data about the fishery in which they operate, and that any attempts by the industry to fund scientific inquiry can be dismissed as “corporate science.”