December 7, 2012 — The following is an excerpt from the opinion piece "ASMFC needs to raise numbers of menhaden" by Charles Walsh:
Writing columns about how important it is to save the menhaden is like writing stories about the planning and zoning board. The very mention of either subject can induce acute boredom, eventually outright sleep.
But like zoning board stories, which are boring only until you discover a developer wants to build a high-rise machine gun factory next to your property, menhaden stories are sleep-inducing only until you realize that these prime forage fish — for bluefish, striped bass and lots of other predatory species that make up the recreational fishery — may be on the brink of disappearing due to commercial overharvesting.
In a little over a month, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will cast an important vote on a management plan for the Atlantic menhaden, aka bunker, fishery.
Since menhaden are not exactly table fare — the fishy smell alone can drive you out of a room — recreational anglers are happy to leave most of them for the job of fattening up the blues and bass they hope to catch. A small percentage of the menhaden population is netted for use as bait. Menhaden can be as small as the last joint of your thumb (called peanut bunker) to almost as big as a tailor bluefish. On average, they are the size of a Nerf football, although not nearly as fat. The larger menhaden make the best drifted or bottom bait, but massive numbers of peanut bunker can make for some of the best inshore fishing.
The story was published on the Connecticut Post , on Equities.com, and in the Fairfield Citizen
Analysis: “ASMFC needs to rule to raise numbers of menhaden,” an opinion piece written by Charles Walsh, relies on exaggerated statements to support the author’s claims that the Atlantic menhaden species is severely threatened.
The menhaden stock is nowhere close to the “brink of disappearing” that the article describes. According to the 2010 Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) menhaden stock assessment, the last assessment considered to be reliable, menhaden are not currently overfished. This means that, according to the ASMFC, the stock is producing enough eggs to sustain itself. In fact, it showed that the stock was producing 40 percent more eggs than an overfished population. Overfishing, when the number of menhaden caught exceeds the mortality rate determined by the ASMFC, occurred only twice in the 15 years between 1993 and 2008.
In 2011, the Commission adopted a new, more conservative baseline for determining overfishing going forward. Based on that new “reference point”, the ASMFC Menhaden Management Board determined that overfishing also occurred in 2011 based on harvest increases, the new reference point, and apparent lack of stock growth. Due to adoption of the new reference point and model uncertainty, no overfishing determinations have been made for 2009 and 2010.
Mr. Walsh’s claim that menhaden biomass has declined 90 percent in 25 years is particularly selective and misleading because it does not examine the whole time series of available data. The length of time cited in the article (the last 25 years) begins during a period (the early-to-mid 1980s) when menhaden biomass was the highest on record. Over the 50-plus years that data on menhaden biomass has been recorded by the ASMFC, biomass has fluctuated based on the strength of menhaden recruitment (the number of menhaden that are born), and current biomass figures are similar to the levels seen in the late 1960s, when biomass was lower on the spectrum. Following this period of low biomass, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw especially strong recruitment and high biomass. The decline that Mr. Walsh cites is part of an alternating cycle of strong and weak recruitment.
The suggested 50 percent reduction in menhaden landings Mr. Walsh and Pew Environment Group support would put the commercial menhaden fishery out of business, causing devastating economic loss to the industry’s home in Virginia’s Northern Neck region. A recent economic impact study conducted by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science highlighted the importance of the industry to this rural area of Virginia: the reduction fishery employs almost 300 people directly, and many more indirectly, and contributes more than $80 million in economic output to the Northern Neck.
When Mr. Walsh expresses frustration that “our publicly appointed commissioners openly debate whether or not there is ‘enough good data’ to move forward with the catch limits they agreed to put in place last November,” he fails to acknowledge the many uncertainties and complexities involved in the fisheries management process. The major uncertainty involved in the current deliberations on menhaden catch concerns the 2012 menhaden stock assessment, which is widely regarded as critically flawed. The model used in the assessment was found to have consistently underestimated the population size and overestimated fishing mortality. The ASMFC Menhaden Technical Committee determined that the results of the 2012 update stock assessment were not suitable to use as a reference for management decisions.