February 3, 2013 — The following is an excerpt from the piece "Good news for menhaden" published on the New England on the Fly blog:
Menhaden — the largely unrecognized lynchpin of the saltwater food chain whose stocks have shown signs of decline in recent years — had a good day this week: the ASMFC’s Menhaden Management Board approved the first ever Atlantic menhaden harvest reduction, setting the reduction at 20%.
Menahaden are known to anglers by various nicknames — “bunker”, “pogy”, “bugeye” — and have been known to them for a long time. The name itself, “Menhaden,” derives from the Native American word fertilizer. A small, bright silver, oily-fleshed fish with a number of spots behind its gills, menhaden are a large part of the diet of striped bass, bluefish, and tuna, to name a few. In addition to supporting popular New England sport fish, they also have many commercial applications, including the production of omega-3 oils for human consumption, active ingredients in Rust-Oleum, and feed to livestock. They are important today, it would seem, as they were back when.
Read the full story at New England on the Fly
Analysis: Although this article states, "This news about the harvest reduction is good for menhaden, and for the salt water species of New England and the East coast," there is no scientific evidence that any fish predator populations are suffering due to a lack of forage fish.
In addition, although New England is mentioned in the above quote, the article does not mention that the current menhaden assessment process includes only very little data from the northern range of the menhaden population. To address this lack of data, Dr. James Sulikowski, of the University of New England, completed an aerial study in 2011 of the area and determined that significant amounts of menhaden are located there. In reviewing this study, Dr. Doug Butterworth and Dr. Alexia Morgan determined that over two times as many fish may exist than are accounted for in the assessment. Because the assessment draws much of the data used to calculate population estimates from fishery data, which is concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic and the Chesapeake Bay, these fish are not included.