October 5, 2012: The following was published by Menhaden Defenders.
Our grassroots group, “Menhaden Defenders” has been working with fellow anglers to increase awareness and get fisherman involved in the fight because they are on the front lines and have watched this vital forage fish vanish right before their eyes.
After sitting before the Atlantic States Marine Fishery Commission (ASMFC) last week, it frustrated me to listen to 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. This meeting made it even more apparent to me that now is the time for us to increase our outreach beyond the recreational fishing community. The industry has its attorneys and lobbyists in place and they are making every attempt to delay this process so they can continue to fish at the unrestricted, breakneck pace they are used to.
Angler outcry and participation is simply not enough as this issue goes so much deeper than fishing. Menhaden fish, in one form or another, are in our lives and due to our seemingly insatiable Omega-3 fever, continue to thrive on our grocer’s and pharmacy shelves. Consumers can’t even begin to perceive the products that it is used in, sprayed on, or grown with. Menhaden or Bunker as we call them here, have been depleted to the lowest levels ever recorded.
Menhaden are the backbone of the marine food web and vitally important to an amazing number of creatures both in the water and along its shores. People everywhere need to know that commercial overfishing has reduced (pun intended) Atlantic Menhaden stocks over 88% from what they used to be. Put simply, if there is not a significant catch limit placed upon this fishery now, we are looking at an ecological disaster in the making.
As the ASMFC continues through this fall with its debate of exactly how much of a catch limit to implement and how many tons of reduced landings each of the two sectors will have to absorb, the demise continues. The bunkers are purse seined and vacuumed up by the ton, ground up and turned into fish meal/fish oil (reduction sector-156K mt) and lobster/crab bait (Bait sector-45K mt). Together, both sectors net over 200,000 metric tons of bunker out of Mid Atlantic waters each year with the majority of landings recorded in Virginia and New Jersey.
Read the full story at Menhaden Defenders
Analysis: Menhaden Defenders’ Paul Eidman, in his article, “Mini Needs Menhaden,” writes of “an ecological disaster in the making” unless new limits are imposed on the Atlantic menhaden fishery. This is just one of several exaggerated claims about the current state of menhaden management in the article, which fails to present several key facts in its account.
The menhaden stock is nowhere close to the “ecological disaster” that the article describes. According to the 2010 menhaden stock assessment, the last assessment considered to be reliable, menhaden are not currently overfished. This means that, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), the stock is producing enough eggs to sustain itself. Overfishing, where 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 Menhaden 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.
The article 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.” However, the real debate concerns the 2012 menhaden stock assessment, which is widely regarded as critically flawed and was determined by the ASMFC’s Menhaden Technical Committee to not be suitable for management advice. The model used in the assessment was found to have consistently underestimated the population size and overestimated fishing mortality. In fact, the new assessment estimated a dramatically lower fishing mortality rate for 2008 than was estimated in the 2010 assessment that found overfishing by a very small amount (0.4%).
Similarly, Eidman writes that menhaden stocks have decreased “over 88% from what they used to be,” and, “many of the menhaden schools north of Cape Cod and south of the Carolinas have simply vaporized.” But this statement is highly selective. The 88% figure only regards a portion of all the available data on menhaden, charting the decline from the early 1980s, a period where menhaden biomass was particularly high due to several years of strong recruitment. However, if the more complete time series going back to the 1950s is examined, the menhaden population is at levels similar to those seen in the 1960s. The full time series also shows that menhaden recruitment is highly variable by year, and periods of high recruitment, such as those seen in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are more likely to be the result of favorable environmental conditions than a reduction in fishing activity.
While the article states, “many of the menhaden schools north of Cape Cod and south of the Carolinas have simply vaporized,” recent evidence suggests that there may be more menhaden in the northern range (the upper Mid-Atlantic and New England) than previously thought. In the fall of 2011, Dr. James Sulikowski, of the University of New England, conducted an aerial survey of the waters off New England and Long Island, New York, to provide partial documentation of the menhaden in the northern range, an area for which there are little data available. When the results of the survey were later analyzed, it was found that the coast-wide menhaden biomass may be twice as high as currently estimated.
The article attempts to buttress its conservation argument by presenting the case of “Mini,” a bottlenose dolphin spotted by the author on a dolphin-watching trip in Sandy Hook, NJ. According to the article, harvest reductions are necessary in order to provide adequate forage for marine animals such as Mini. The author’s account relies exclusively on anecdotal data, which is not consistent with current scientific literature. Bottlenose dolphins do not exclusively, nor even primarily, eat menhaden. A 2004 study by Damon Gannon and Danielle Waples, of the Duke University Marine Laboratory, examined the stomach contents of bottlenose dolphins near North Carolina and found that the largest parts of their diet were Atlantic croaker, weakfish, and squid.
Eidman bases his arguments around several misleading claims about menhaden. The result is a portrayal of the fishery that is significantly more dire than what is actually indicated in the most relevant scientific data.