November 15, 2012 — The following is an excerpt from The Frederick News Post:
I am reminded of the old carnival shell game. Just when you think you can win, the guy shuffling the shells takes your money. Over a year ago, we all wrote our letters telling the decision-makers how strongly we felt about menhaden. Now they are knocking at the door again. One more time, we have to stand up and be counted. We have to tell the people in charge that we still don't want the big commercial harvesters of the fish that has been called "the most important fish in the sea" to continue their rapacious ways.
My friend John Page Williams, chief naturalist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, points out that abundant critters such as oysters (harvested by the bushel) are taken for granted, even when they are essential to the health of the bay. The menhaden's harvest takes it to another level. The fish are not even touched by human hands. The schools are surrounded by purse seine nets after airplane spotters pinpoint the location of the school. Then, as the noose of the net is pulled tighter, strangling the caught fish into a mass of struggling fish, a vacuum hose from the factory ship is lowered into the mass of panicked fish sucking them up into the ship where they are placed in a refrigerated hold. The menhaden are vulnerable to the nets because tight schooling is something that they do to look like a large fish as a defense mechanism.
So what are these finny little creatures? Menhaden, also called bunker, pogy, alewife or bugfish, are a small, silvery fish belonging to the herring family. Their range is from Florida to Maine. After spawning offshore, the young of the year and year-old fish migrate into Atlantic estuaries. I am old enough to remember when the bunker migrated up the bay in the spring followed by huge bluefish and rockfish. We caught them all. Now the larger bunker tend to migrate up the coast to the waters off New England. Not surprisingly, so do large predatory fish.
Read the full story in the Frederick News Post
Analysis: In the Frederick News Post article, “Atlantic menhaden threatened — still,” Jim Heim relies on anecdotal stories and misleading facts as support for his allegation that menhaden are the “most important fish in the sea.” This is just one of several exaggerated claims made about the species in the article, which ultimately misrepresents the status of menhaden in its account.
When the article references menhaden as “the most important fish in the sea,” a frequently used idiom in articles about the species, it fails to include a proper explanation of the quote. Originating from Rutgers University English Professor, Dr. H. Bruce Franklin’s book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea, the phrase stems from entirely qualitative judgements 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.
In an attempt to explain changes in menhaden migration, the article states that, “After spawning offshore, the young of the year and year-old fish migrate into Atlantic estuaries. I am old enough to remember when the bunker migrated up the bay in the spring followed by huge bluefish and rockfish…Now the larger bunker tend to migrate up the coast to the waters off New England.” However, the author’s interpretation of the migration of menhaden is incorrect. When released, the eggs and larvae of menhaden are transported into the Chesapeake Bay and other estuaries. Once there, they grow into juvenile, filter-feeding menhaden which begin forming tight-knit schools, famous for their large size. When these menhaden reach about a year old, many of them migrate out of the Chesapeake Bay and these estuaries to join the full migrating stock. This stock of older fish, as data indicates for as long as the population has been studied, migrates north into the waters of New England. These fish have never “migrated up the bay,” as the article suggests.
Describing a recent fishing trip on a charter boat, the author points out that the rockfish he had caught seemed to be severely underfed, though none of them had sores from mycobacteriosis. He blamed these few underfed fish on the diminished menhaden population, claiming that, “they were not fat and sassy like the rock that we caught 20-plus years ago.” However, like much of the Chesapeake Bay’s current ecological problems, environmental degradation from nutrient runoff is likely to play a key role in the malnourishment of striped bass and the spread of mycobacteriosis. Excess nitrogen and other nutrients that enter the Bay from sources such as agriculture and urban development lead to algal blooms, the excessive growth of phytoplankton and algae. When these blooms die off, the process of decay consumes the oxygen in the surrounding water, creating hypoxic (low oxygen) areas. These hypoxic areas are usually in deeper, cooler waters, which bass inhabit during the summer. But because the hypoxic conditions make them uninhabitable, the bass are forced into shallower, warmer waters for which they are not ideally suited. The sub-optimal temperature makes them unable to feed properly, and makes them more susceptible to disease. This phenomenon, known as the thermal niche/oxygen squeeze, was documented in striped bass in reservoirs by Charles Coutant, a scientist now retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Coutant published three scientific journal articles (one in 1988 and two in 1990) describing the same phenomenon for striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay.
Though the Heim’s article states, “Other predators that feed on them include numerous birds of prey — eagles, osprey and gulls — who feed on the fragments when predator fish slash through the schools,” this statement does not fully explain the situation. Most predator species in estuarine environments eat menhaden whole (with the notable exception of bluefish, which do slash through schools.) Therefore, the article’s notion that slashing through schools will somehow provide other species with food is not likely, with the small exception of bluefish.
In “Atlantic menhaden threatened — still,” the author manipulates facts and uses personal anecdotes in order to convince readers that the menhaden population is in a more dire situation than reality.