Fishery managers eye whether to weigh ecological role of Atlantic menhaden in setting harvest limits
October 12, 2017 — If you were to round up all of the menhaden swimming along the Atlantic coast and somehow put them on a scale, they’d weigh in at about 1.2 million metric tons.
To visualize that, imagine 220,000 Asian elephants stampeding along the coast — about five times more than exist in the world. For menhaden, though, that equates to tens of billions of tiny fish. This fall, fishery managers will tackle the question of whether that’s enough.
An update on the status of Atlantic menhaden released in August found the population robust. The current biomass, combining their number and weight, is the greatest that scientists have estimated in the last four years — and more than was seen anytime from 1992 through 2007.
Menhaden are not overfished, the report concluded — fewer than 200,000 metric tons were caught last year.
But critics, including some scientists and many conservation groups, say those figures only tell part of the story. Menhaden should not be looked at in isolation, they say, but as part of the broader marine ecosystem, where the small, oily fish is an important food for other fish, whales, sea birds and a host of other species.
“We’re probably not going to damage the menhaden stock all that much by continued heavy fishing. It seems to be in reasonably good shape,” said Ed Houde, a fisheries scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “But what happens to the rest of the ecosystem? That’s the question mark.”
In November, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a panel of state fishery managers that regulates catches of migratory fish along the coast, will grapple with whether it should continue to manage menhaden as a single species — or begin considering its value to the ecosystem as well.