How an angler and two government bureaucrats may have saved the Atlantic Ocean.
Another industry with a significant economic stake in menhaden is the commercial lobster business, which uses menhaden as bait. In New England, decades of fishing pressure on sea herring, the preferred bait fish for lobster traps, have left the stock in precarious shape. Unable to purchase enough cheap herring to fill their traps, many lobstermen have turned to menhaden, lobster’s second-favorite food. In 2006, menhaden made up just 6 percent of lobster bait in Maine. Today it could be as high as 32 percent, according to the Fishermen’s Voice, a publication serving the men and women who work on Maine’s waters. Supplying those lobstermen is a bait industry that fishes primarily off the New Jersey and Virginia shores. Bait fishermen pull far fewer menhaden out of the sea than Omega Protein does, but those fish are worth more, pound for pound: bait commands a higher price per fish. In addition, the industry’s economic impact is spread among several different players and states.
All these stakeholder industries together have a massive economic footprint. And yet, precisely because it is dominated by a single, powerful entity, the reduction industry has held by far the greatest political sway over the management decisions of the ASMFC. This state of affairs is helped along by the fact that the bait and reduction industries have formed an unlikely alliance against any sort of regulation that might inhibit their catch—despite their being in competition for limited supplies of menhaden. This alliance is historically strange. In the nineteenth century, bait fishermen rioted and burned down at least one reduction factory in Maine, in response to the reduction industry’s massive sweep of the resource. “Now there’s no memory of this at all,” Bruce Franklin told me. “Omega has convinced the bait fishery that an attack on one is an attack on all. But in fact, the bait fishery is being allowed to fish from Omega’s crumbs that fall off the table.”
Recreational anglers, by contrast, are some of the most passionate advocates for the conservation of menhaden—or bunker, as the fish is known in New England. Anglers don’t harvest much of the resource themselves—the ASMFC estimates less than 1 percent of the total catch—but they know that where menhaden go, so go stripers, bluefish, weakfish, and dozens of other fish species they like to catch and eat. It is not uncommon, when scanning the popular angler message boards online, to see messages like “Last night Stripers were going berserk over juvy bunker!”
Throughout the 2000s, marine biologists continued to report diseased, scrawny striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay, the spawning ground for 75 percent of the Atlantic migratory population. In 2006, official ASMFC science showed depleted stocks of weakfish as well. The reason: with low numbers of menhaden, striped bass were out-competing weakfish for prey, and increasingly munching on weakfish juveniles to make up for lost calories. That study came on the heels of another on ospreys, which feed heavily on menhaden in Virginia. According to decades of research by the College of William and Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology, by 2006 osprey parents were bringing one-third fewer fish back to their chicks than they were in the 1970s. Survival of osprey nestlings in Virginia had fallen to its lowest levels since DDT was first introduced to the area. In the 1980s, more than 70 percent of the osprey diet was menhaden; by 2006 it was down to 27 percent.
Yet despite the steady drip of evidence, and continued lobbying by angler and environmental groups, the ASMFC took no action to limit the coastal menhaden catch in the mid-2000s. When pressed, commissioners would point to the stock assessments, which continued to show that the menhaden population was relatively healthy and not overfished.
In 2009, the Menhaden Technical Committee updated its methodology for estimating the menhaden population—something it does every five years—and then ran the menhaden catch data through a new computer model. The results weren’t much different: although the numbers of menhaden were declining, the estimated number of eggs produced by spawning female menhaden was at the target level, so according to the reference point, menhaden weren’t being overfished.
Shortly thereafter, a colleague of Jim Uphoff’s, a biologist named Alexei Sharov, got hold of the computer model that had been updated by NOAA scientists. Going through the code line by line, Sharov, one of Maryland’s representatives on the Technical Committee, found a fundamental miscalculation buried inside the model. Uphoff, meanwhile, studied the methodology of the code and discovered that NOAA had both underestimated the amount of fish killed by the industry and overestimated the spawning potential. Sharov brought these two mistakes to his peers on the committee, and it was agreed that corrections needed to be made.
Several months later, after the model had finished running a second time, the science finally caught up with what Jim Price and the anglers had been saying for decades: even using the lax reference points developed by the ASMFC, menhaden had been subject to overfishing in thirty-two of the past fifty-four years. When the assessment was then peer reviewed by a group of international scientists, the reviewers deemed that the reference point currently in use for menhaden—8 percent of maximum spawning potential—was not sufficiently safe or precautionary.
Furthermore, the number of menhaden swimming in the Atlantic had declined by 88 percent since 1983—to a level so low that it caused George Lapointe, former commissioner of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, to have what he called an “oh shit moment.”
Five months later, in August 2011, the ASMFC reviewed its menhaden stock assessment and, in the fashion of twelve-step programs, begrudgingly admitted that it had a problem. They prepared a long and technical document to send out for public comment. At the heart of it was the question of how big the base population of menhaden should be, as expressed in terms of spawning potential. The document listed four options. The lowest was the number ASMFC had long recommended: 8 percent of maximum spawning potential, or MSP. The highest option was 40 percent of MSP. Even that was far below what independent scientists have advised in recent years. A 2011 paper published in the journal Science recommended precautionary management for forage fish, leaving up to 75 percent of virgin biomass in the water to account for the needs of predators. Still, the range of options represented a major advance. Of the 91,000 comments the ASMFC received on the proposal over the next three months, the majority argued for 40 percent.
Feed the Political AnimalDonate
Washington Monthly depends on donations from readers like you.