If you love osprey, bald eagles, game fishing, gardening, or omega 3 for your heart, then you also love menhaden.
The fish, which is so lowly it’s been used in fertilizer for hundreds of years, has so many uses to people, marine life and birds that managing the menhaden fishery for the benefit of all stakeholders is the subject of a Florida-to-Maine public opinion gathering effort.
Spearheaded by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the group created a document, known as Amendment 3, that outlines seven menhaden fisheries management issues. The public may submit comments by Oct. 20. Decisions will be made during a marine fisheries commission meeting Nov. 13-14 in Maryland.
Also known as bunker, menhaden are not fished for human consumption in their whole bony, oily, state, but for two primary industries: the bait fishery which sells to other fishermen, and the reduction fishery that produces fish meal for animal feed, fertilizer, and oil for products such as omega 3 supplements.
Where do all the menhaden go?
The ASMFC board sets the menhaden fishery quota, or Total Allowable Catch (TAC) every two years. For 2017, the TAC was set at 200,000 metric tons. The TAC is then divided up among 15 states, very unequally.
There are many small bait fishing operations along the Atlantic coast, but primarily one reduction fishery operation: Virginia-based Omega Protein, which is allotted about 80 percent of the entire TAC from Florida to Maine.
In Connecticut, menhaden may be more valuable in the water than hauled out in nets. Commercial menhaden fishing in this state is negligible.
But, as food for larger fish, osprey, eagles, some types of whales, seals, dolphins and sharks, menhaden play a big part in the food web, support a variety of wildlife-based industries, and contribute to the overall health of Long Island Sound.
Fifteen public hearings are scheduled between Florida and Maine, the area under ASMFC’s authority. The first was Sept. 11 at the DEEP Marine Headquarters Education Center in Old Lyme. About 25 people attended, including Bill Lucey, the new Long Island Soundkeeper.
In addition to his widespread fisheries work, Lucey was also a commercial fisherman, and says that he can see fisheries management issues from both the conservation and commercial sides.
“I’m a multi-use kind of guy,” he said during a phone interview. “I know that people’s jobs and families depend on these fisheries. There is room to commercially fish menhaden.” Many small-scale fishermen would like to see a more equitable distribution, Lucey said.
“It’s tough to say scientifically… obviously food source is a link in recovery,” Lucey said. Many at the hearing directly linked the return of osprey, bald eagles and large mammal sightings to increases in menhaden in recent years based on their own observations. Lucey said that anecdotally the evidence seems to be there, and science often comes to prove what individuals have observed.
The most pressing question in Amendment 3 is whether to continue to manage menhaden as a fish in isolation, or move to a more progressive strategy that considers menhaden’s many roles in the environment.
“The problem is that we don’t know what the needs of all the other animals in the environment are, so we should err on the side of caution,” Lucey said, which is why he favors Option E.
Attendees at the hearing unanimously supported Amendment 3’s Option E, which targets leaving 75 percent of the menhadens unfished biomass (an estimate of what the population might be in the absence of fishing) in the water, and sets a 40 percent threshold that could halt fishing for the year if the population falls below that threshold.
Option E is designed to reduce pressure on the menhaden while an ASMFC committee, known as BERP, researches ways to quantify the needs of the marine animals that rely on menhaden as a food source, or menhaden-specific Ecological Reference Points (ERP).
“This is the first time they would put in the 75 percent target, which is overly protective if you’re using the old single species model, but if you consider all of the stakeholders, it may not be protective enough,” Lucey said, adding, “as far as the Atlantic, it is my understanding that it (considering ERPs) hasn’t been done this way before.”
The Old Lyme attendees were not all fishermen, but included others with wildlife-based interests: birders, photographers, bird protectors, charter captains, osprey experts, and representatives from local and national environmental groups.
“The questions to consider are how many menhaden in a good year could the Atlantic support; the other issue is what percent of the whole menhaden stock breed in Chesapeake Bay,” Lucey said, adding “It’s estimated at 50 percent, so why would you fish your breeding stock?” How to go forward with the Chesapeake Bay menhaden fishery cap is another of the amendment’s questions.
There are natural cycles of good and poor spawning years, but there is built-in insurance that can reduce some of the effects of a bad breeding year.
“We call them Big Fat Fish, or BFF,” Lucey said, explaining that “an 8-year-old menhaden will produce many more eggs than a 2 or 3-year-old will.” Commercial fisheries tend to take older, larger fish.
“Models are simply models, inherently uncertain,” Lucey said, “but we need to put a lot of support behind fisheries managers, and both sides need to have faith in the process.
State and federal governments need to provide the resources, time and people to run the various models,” which can reduce some of the uncertainty.
In all, Amendment 3 includes seven issues which effect how the menhaden population will be managed to fulfill the myriad roles they play above and below the surface of the sea. To view all of Amendment 3 and for information about submitting comments, visit the commission’s website, www.asmfc.org, under Public Input.
Published in the ShoreLine Times Sept. 28, 2017. Photo by Kristofer Rowe.