March 25, 2012 – Five years ago, Bruce Franklin's important book, "The Most Important Fish in the Sea" hit the shelves of bookstores. For the first time, many people understood the importance of one the ocean's smallest fish, the menhaden, to the overall cycle of life in the world's oceans.
Without "pogies" (the Tar Heel nickname for menhaden), there'd be fewer and much smaller striped bass, dolphin, yellowfin and bluefin tuna, wahoo, king and Spanish mackerel, flounder, red drum, bluefish and spotted seatrout. If the ocean were populated by burger-eating game fishes, pogies would be the most-popular menu item at McMenhaden (with 100 billion gazillion sold). Waters would be more polluted as well.
Franklin pointed out the tragic history of pogies, most importantly noting how menhaden have been netted since pre-history days in America, through the country's pioneer days (also by Native Americans), during the Revolutionary War and into the modern era. But from the 1700s through the 20th century, netting efforts were crude, mainly by individuals wielding make-shift cast nets. But with the arrival of industrial fishing (spotter airplanes and sonar) co-joined with mechanized purse-seine fishing by huge "reduction" ships, menhaden numbers have dropped precipitously.
North Carolina once had two major menhaden reduction factories and fleets of ships at Oak Island and Morehead City. About three or four years ago, Jules Wheatley converted his pogie factory at Beaufort into condominiums (Southport's factory closed in the 1970s). Wheatley had one ship left at that point; the other had been sunk at an artificial reef.
Nonetheless, when a Southport lawyer and N.C. House representative, Bonner Stiller, tried to get a piece of legislation passed that would keep all pogie boats out of Brunswick County nearshore waters, Wheatley testified against the proposed bill in Raleigh. Before the next netting season, he dropped out of the menhaden business.
Analysis:
While the article correctly notes that the menhaden stock is not currently considered to be overfished by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), it also makes claims about the health of the resource not supported by recent stock assessments.
Both the article and the book it mentions, H. Bruce Franklin's The Most Important Fish in the Sea, claim that menhaden are currently being overexploited by the reduction fishery. Franklin goes as far as saying that the reduction industry is "massacring the juvenile fish before they can reach maturity and spawn to make more fish" (The Most Important Fish in the Sea, pg. 135).
What the article and Franklin's book fail to mention is that, according to several of the most recent ASMFC stock assessments, menhaden are not considered to be overfished, and there has been no significant pattern of overfishing over the last decade. Egg production in the stock is at its target level, and fishing has only exceeded the mortality threshold once in the last ten years. The article, and Franklin's book, also ignore the evidence that there is a historically poor correlation between fishing levels and menhaden recruitment, and, as explained by NOAA, "environmental factors may be the defining factor in the production of good year classes [of menhaden]."
The article also makes the commonly cited claim that menhaden help clean up the water. In The Most Important Fish in the Sea, Franklin writes, "the health of our East Coast bays and estuaries…depends on these small fish" (The Most Important Fish in the Sea, pg. 21). Similarly, the article writes that without menhaden, "waters would be more polluted." However, menhaden's role as filter feeders is one that is in dispute, as several scientific studies have concluded that their impact on overall water quality is negligible.