The coming days will be the tale of two fish and the regulatory process by which the pair is protected and managed. The future of one fish, the striped bass, is directly tied to the future of the other, menhaden. But you wouldn’t know it by the way the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is acting.
Some commissioners are hair-on-fire ready to vote on Monday to begin the process of adding new protections for striped bass that could change size and creel limits or shorten the fishing season. Forget the fact that the science to back such a decision—a new stock assessment–is still more than a month away from completion.
But the menhaden debate may linger on, as it has for years, or result in approval of some half-hearted measure.
Read the complete opinion piece from The Baltimore Sun.