November 17, 2012 — The following is an excerpt from the High Point Enterprise:
Sometimes called a pogie, the menhaden is one of the most unglamorous fish in the ocean. These are filter feeders and a forage fish for almost every prized species in coastal salt water. For coastal fish like red drum, stripers, mackerel, sea trout and flounder, they are a primary and critical part of the food chain. Because of their importance to other species, menhaden have been called the most important fish in the sea and they’ve been put through more than 50 years of overfishing. The stock is at a record low. Who is suffering from the loss of menhaden? You are.
Omega Protein, a company that uses menhaden to make fish oil and other products is the primary consumer of menhaden on the East Coast. They have been doing everything they can to prevent the implementation of a total allowable catch and a rebuilding effort. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they maintain that menhaden are merely suffering from poor recruitment and that their half billion pound harvest has nothing to do with it. The company uses spotter planes to locate the fish, rush over with processing ships, encircle the school with a purse net and suck them up into the hold. The fishing method is so efficient there’s no way for the menhaden to avoid them.
Read the full story in the High Point Enterprise
Analysis: With the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) having just concluded a public comment period regarding prospective Atlantic menhaden harvest cuts, the group Menhaden Defenders is pushing their readers to support, among other options, a 50 percent reduction in menhaden landings. The organization created an online petition campaign for readers to sign and send to ASMFC representatives urging the Commission to adopt severe restrictions on the allowable menhaden catch. This opinion piece by Dick Jones, “Save the Pogies,” published in the High Point Enterprise, relies exclusively on information from the Menhaden Defenders petition, “Menhaden need a break.” However, Mr. Jones and Menhaden Defenders give inaccurate accounts of the health of the menhaden population, ultimately misleading their respective readers.
Mr. Jones is quick to fault Omega Protein for a decline in the menhaden population, writing that the company “has been doing everything it can to prevent the implementation of a total allowable catch and a rebuilding effort,” and that “they [Omega Protein] maintain that menhaden are merely suffering from poor recruitment — their half billion pound harvest has nothing to do with it.” Despite this dismissal, poor recruitment is very likely an important factor in lower menhaden biomass. According to the last ASMFC menhaden stock assessment, menhaden are not overfished, meaning that the current menhaden population is producing the necessary number of eggs to sustain itself. In fact, the species is producing 40 percent more eggs than a population that would be considered overfished.
By this measure, the problem with menhaden is not that there are too few menhaden spawning, but that too few menhaden are subsequently being born. Much of the scientific data on the menhaden stock reinforces the claim that reducing fishing mortality is not an effective way to influence the size of the menhaden population. Historically, the number of menhaden caught by the fishery does not seem to have a strong influence on the number of menhaden that spawn. In its 2010 stock assessment, the ASMFC concluded that menhaden population changes “are almost entirely driven by non-fishery sources.” Similarly, NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay Office concludes, “environmental factors may be the defining factor in the production of good year classes [of menhaden].”
Instead of acknowledging the impact of environmental factors on the menhaden population, Mr. Jones underrepresents the status of the menhaden population. “They’ve been put through more than 50 years of overfishing,” the article claims, but fails to specifically define this alleged over-exploitation. According to the 2010 Atlantic menhaden stock assessment, in the last fifteen years for which data is available, overfishing has only occurred twice. The last recorded instance of overfishing was in 2008, when the fishery was just 0.4 percent over the threshold determined by the ASMFC. There is currently no reliable data for fishing activity in the last four years, and the exact status of the menhaden stock is not known.
Mr. Jones also uses the often-cited phrase “the most important fish in the sea,” in reference to menhaden. The article does not explain the term’s origin, and presents it as a scientific qualification. In fact, this phrase comes from the title and premise of the book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America, by Rutgers University Professor, Dr. H. Bruce Franklin. The statement is entirely qualitative, based on judgments made by the author. There is no scientific evidence supporting the hyperbolic statement that any one species of fish is "most important," and promulgating this idea represents only the author’s opinion, rather than any scientific consensus.