October 22, 2012 — The following is an excerpt of a petition sponsored by the Pew Environment Group.
In a landmark move last year, East Coast fishery managers—responding to a plea for action by more than 90,000 people like you—committed to advancing new protections for Atlantic menhaden. Now we need your help to make sure these plans become real improvements on the water.
Menhaden populations have plummeted 90 percent over the past 25 years and remain at an all-time low—just 10 percent of historic levels. Because these small fish are prey for larger animals, this decline threatens to disrupt coastal and marine food webs and affect the thousands of fishing, whale-watching, and bird-watching businesses that menhaden help support.
We need to leave more menhaden in the ocean to promote their recovery. There is no limit on the total amount of these fish that can be caught at sea. Every year, hundreds of millions of them are ground up to make fertilizer; fish meal for farm animals, pets, and aquaculture; and oil for dietary supplements.
Read the full petition on the Pew website and the Petition Site
Analysis: The petition from the Pew Environment Group, making claims similar to previous Pew advocacy on menhaden, is full of selective quoting of menhaden science. Examining all relevant information on menhaden reveals a situation that is much less dire than Pew suggests.
The petition's claim that menhaden biomass has declined 90 percent in 25 years is particularly selective, 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 particularly high. Over the 50-plus years that data on menhaden biomass has been recorded by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (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. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, several years saw especially strong recruitment, which were followed by years of high biomass. The decline that the petition cites is part of an alternating cycle of strong and weak recruitment.
Missing from the discussion of the decline and growth of menhaden biomass is the role of climate and environment, two major influences on recruitment. While the commercial fleet has declined by about 79% since the mid 1980s (from 38 vessels in 1984 to 8 vessels in 2012), environmental conditions have fluctuated widely, producing circumstances that are alternately favorable and unfavorable for menhaden recruitment. Conditions in the late 1970s and early 1980s proved favorable, during a period when the menhaden industry was significantly larger than it is today; conditions since have been considerably less so. The relationship between menhaden and climate is recognized both by NOAA, which writes, “menhaden recruitment appears to be independent of fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass, indicating environmental factors may be the defining factor in the production of good year classes,” and the ASMFC, which concluded that fluctuations in menhaden abundance may be, “almost entirely driven by non-fishery sources.”