15 minute read
The Pogy Problem
By T. Edward Nickens
Menhaden continue to be mismanaged by legislative bodies, negatively affecting recreational fisheries in both Atlantic and Gulf states.
The nets are called purse seine nets, and there is nothing inherently nefarious about them. They are simply effective. Astonishingly effective.
The spotter planes go out first: Fixed-winged aircraft that course low across the water, sometimes as low as 500 feet. In the Gulf of Mexico, they probe the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, and to a lesser extent, the waters off Texas and Alabama. Along the shores of Virginia, they scour the Chesapeake Bay and the open ocean. No matter the water, the spotters look for dark splotches that signal a school of menhaden, the small, oil-rich fish some call “the most important fish in the sea.” On the radio, the spotters stay in contact with large fishing vessels below, called “steamers.” Many are of World War II vintage, retrofitted for the job. Riding on the steamers are two seine boats, some as long as 40 feet. Each carries half of a purse seine net that can be 1,700 feet long or better, and some 60 feet deep. Top-line corks float the upper edge, while the bottom edge is fitted with metal rings, through which a cable passes to cinch the net shut.
When the fish are located, the spotter plane directs the action. The seine boats are lowered overboard, and they begin to circle the school, playing out the net. As the seine boats close the circle, the steamer pushes more fish into the net. Soon the bottom of the purse seine is winched tight, and a hydraulic “raise rig” lifts the net to the surface. There, tens of thousands of fish are sucked into the ship’s hold through a vacuum hose more than a foot wide. There is little culling, and little ability to sort the catch. With few exceptions—such as marine mammals and sea turtles—whatever is in the net is disgorged into the ship’s hold. Whatever is in the net dies.
Along the two coastlines, the menhaden fishery is an enormous industry—the second largest continental fishery by weight—even though limited to a relatively few players. Two foreign-owned companies dominate: In the Gulf of Mexico, the enormous Omega Protein company operates fishing fleets and fish processing plants in Abbeville, Louisiana, and Moss Point, Mississippi, while Daybrook operations are sited at Empire, Louisiana. In the Gulf alone, the two companies harvest about 1.2 billion pounds of menhaden each year. Along the Atlantic coast, Omega Protein runs a menhaden processing plant in Reedville, Virginia. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission approved in November a 20 percent increase in the coastwide catch to nearly 515 million pounds. In the Chesapeake Bay alone, the harvest cap is still nearly a staggering 112 million pounds.
Given such numbers, you might think that menhaden harvests would be deeply studied and carefully regulated. Instead, the menhaden fishery has the dubious distinction of being among the most unregulated in the country.
This despite growing concerns over bycatch.
This despite the critical role these diminutive fish play in feeding scores of fish species.
This despite better ways to manage menhaden.
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Pogy, fatback, bunker—depending on where you live, there are a number of nicknames for menhaden. The small filter feeders seine the open water for phytoplankton and zooplankton, and travel in enormous schools. Oily and soft-fleshed, menhaden are ground up, or “reduced,” to provide meal for pet foods and other products, and oil for nutrition supplements.
It’s a fish you likely wouldn’t eat if given the chance, but there are plenty of other willing takers. Menhaden are consumed by at least 32 prey groups. Redfish, speckled trout, and seabirds key in on the juvenile fish. King and Spanish mackerel, sharks, gag grouper, dolphins, tuna, and mahi mahi hunt the adults; one study showed that Gulf menhaden support some 40 percent of the diets of both Spanish and king mackerel, and 20 percent of the food base for speckled trout. Along the mid-Atlantic and northeastern coasts, menhaden are a primary food source for striped bass, which have been shown to be particularly sensitive to menhaden harvest: not enough menhaden equals reduced striper growth and less successful spawning. And menhaden are a primary food source for tarpon in both the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast. A Bonefish & Tarpon Trust-sponsored study of fin clips from angler-caught tarpon was launched to use stable isotope analysis to help determine the importance of menhaden and other prey items to tarpon from Louisiana to Virginia. Many fish spend three to five months per year in more northerly foraging areas such as North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound. “If we can show that this is a very important food source in those northern areas,” says Dr. Lucas Griffin, a BTT collaborating scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, “it really leverages the message not only of menhaden conservation but the conservation of habitat and water quality that supports the freshwater flows menhaden need.” Just like stripers, insufficient menhaden forage for tarpon likely impacts growth rates and spawning.
All of this explains why menhaden are called a “forage fish”: By their legions they feed a significant portion of sea life along both the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts. Unfortunately, current efforts to manage menhaden populations—and both commercial and recreational harvests of the fish for bait—are coming up short. Historically, menhaden have been managed under a single-species stock assessment scenario, in which harvest levels are projected to maximize the number of fish that can be caught in a given year while preventing overfishing. A typical stock assessment is a snapshot of a current species population, but it doesn’t take into account ecological considerations beyond the target species’ numbers. Stock assessments don’t factor in the ecology of the ecosystems in which the fish live. They don’t incorporate metrics such as water quality or habitat needs. They don’t take into account how critical a fish population might be to other fish and wildlife species as prey items, and they don’t reflect the critical role menhaden play in nutrient cycling—feeding on plankton and transferring those nutrients far up the food chain.
Other concerns about the current management strategy for the menhaden fishery are worries that the close-to-shore fishery—in many instances, the purse seines are deployed within a few hundred yards of the beach—damages shallow-water bottom habitat and can foul the water with a nasty mix of discarded fish and oily effluent.
And then there is bycatch. Many statistics point to the relatively low percentages of bycatch in the menhaden fishery. Estimates range between 1 and 2.5 percent, but when the commercial take is in excess of a billion pounds, the small percentages add up. An average annual haul in the Gulf of Mexico might be in the neighborhood of a billion pounds of menhaden. But 2.35 percent of that is 23 million pounds of bycatch. That’s no small number. NOAA reported in a 2016 study of bycatch in the Gulf menhaden fishery that as many as 1.1 million pounds of redfish fall prey to the purse seines each year. That figure certainly includes untold thousands of healthy breeding fish.
Partnering For A Better Way
While it is true that recent stock assessments of menhaden—in the Gulf in 2021 and the Atlantic in 2022—concluded that the fisheries were not overfished or experiencing overfishing, it is also true that using traditional stock assessments alone is an outdated and incomplete way of stewarding fish populations. “Stock assessments are a reactive approach,” explains Dr. Aaron Adams, BTT Director of Science and Conservation. “By the time you notice in a stock assessment that the fishery is declining, it may be too late to correct. If fish populations are declining due to overfishing, theoretically you can correct that. But if the critical habitat is lost, you’re done. For menhaden, issues such as habitat loss and water quality problems are mostly outside the processes that drive management.” And the growth of a market for menhaden as bait—both for recreational anglers and commercial crabbers and lobster potters—is something to keep an eye on. In the Atlantic, nearly a third of menhaden harvest is for bait and recreational landings.
Which is why BTT and a host of partners—among them the American Sportfishing Association, Coastal Conservation Association, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, National Audubon Society, Founding Fish Network, and fishing groups along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts—are working to change the narrative around menhaden harvests, and push regulators to recognize and codify a new way of thinking about these fish populations. Instead of simply managing by the numbers, disconnected from other ecological factors, a new paradigm would take into consideration the various other factors that affect fish populations.
Imagine, explains Adams, that you were in charge of throwing a luncheon buffet for 50 people. You ordered the food, put the kitchen staff in place, and opened the doors. Unfortunately, the first 10 guests in line were hungry and ate like hogs, loading their plates down as they moved through the buffet line. The next 20 guests might still have ample grub, but at the end of the line, the last 20 folks might find the roast beef picked over, the chicken down to a few scraggly wings, the deviled eggs gone, and the dessert table holding nothing but crumbs.
If you simply walked into the dining room at that moment, Adams explains, all you would know is that a lot of your guests got the short end of the stick. You wouldn’t know if there was a food shortage, or if kitchen staff didn’t show up for work, or if other factors were at play in the dearth of food.
“And that’s where we are with menhaden,” explains Adams. “There’s a black box that holds all these other factors that aren’t accounted for in a stock assessment, but that impact the population size. And we don’t look inside the black box.” We may know how many menhaden there are, he says, but not how many there could be, or should be, and what the limiting factors are that create such a gap. Much less is known about the impact harvest has on the ecosystem and the many species that rely on menhaden as food.
And it’s not only menhaden that are managed under this blinders-on approach, but just about every marine fish. Snook, redfish, permit, flounder, speckled trout—single species stock assessments are the standard methodology for modern marine fisheries management.
This needs to change, and thankfully, there are some steps in the right direction. In 2020, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted unanimously to include ecological reference points in its decisions affecting Atlantic menhaden. For the first time, consideration of menhaden’s impacts up the food chain would be required. A study had earlier found that without menhaden reduction fishing, there would be nearly 30 percent more striped bass in the system. For 2023, the ASMFC increased the catch quota for Atlantic menhaden by 20 percent, citing the 2022 stock assessment that found that the fish is in a healthy stock condition. But the commission was considering much higher increases, so conservationists breathed a sigh of relief.
“We’d still like to see fewer menhaden extracted overall,” says Kellie Ralston, BTT Vice President for Conservation and Public Policy, “but we ended up in a pretty good place as far as the current harvest levels. It’s still a challenge with Atlantic menhaden, because the harvest is not well distributed along the coast, and there are locations in Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay with localized, concentrated menhaden harvest. This concentrated harvest can result in localized fishery depletions and impacts.” In June of 2022, BTT joined with a coalition of other groups and individual anglers that sent a petition to Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin asking him to move menhaden fishing out of Chesapeake Bay, which has resulted in a process to establish harvest buffer areas.
Fisheries conservationists hail these new approaches. “This is a relatively new approach to fisheries management,” explains Chris Macaluso, Director of TRCP’s Center for Marine Fisheries, “and there are lots of questions about how to find the right balance, and what this kind of management is going to look like in both the commercial and recreational fisheries. There are a lot of unanswered question that we are making our way through right now, but the broad scientific concept is fairly simple: Leave enough menhaden in the water to feed other fish.”
At present, Louisiana is at the center of these efforts because Louisiana holds a number of dubious distinctions. It is the only Gulf state that allows nearly unregulated fishing of menhaden. Florida’s blanket net ban keeps menhaden vessels out of its waters. Alabama has banned the practice. Other Gulf states have enacted buffer zones inside of which menhaden netting is disallowed: Texas has a half-mile limit, while Mississippi has buffer zones that extend one mile from the beach.
Louisiana has not followed suit, however. The state’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries nixed a proposed one-mile buffer zone in 2020. And in 2022, Louisiana House Bill 1033 passed the House of Representatives but was stymied in the Senate. The bill would have capped Louisiana’s menhaden haul at 573 million pounds a year.
Part of the challenge in Louisiana and other Gulf States is rooted in the structure of the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission (GSMFC). Unlike the ASMFC, whose decisions are legally binding among the states and come with enforcement protocols, the GCMFC doesn’t have the authority to set regional catch limits and enforce them. The GCMFC “lacks the teeth of the Atlantic states’ agreements,” says Ralston. That requires a state-by-state approach, which is both time-consuming and more likely to involve political pressures from industry and legislators.
For example, Louisiana did accept a quarter-mile buffer in late 2021, but that exclusion zone was originally proposed as a halfmile buffer. A quarter-mile provides very little protection, says Macaluso. “That line isn’t based off the water’s edge, but on the inside-outside shrimp line established in the legislature. It was a token measure by the Louisiana Department of Fish and Wildlife. In places those boats are still right on top of the beach. The peak of the menhaden fishery is during the redfish spawn, from mid-August to November. And that’s when you see the majority of dead redfish floating to the beach, and dramatic decreases in water quality.”
That quarter-mile effort was against the wishes of the conservation community, says David Cresson, Chief Executive Officer of the Coastal Conservation Association Louisiana. “It was just a way for the state to shut everybody up and look like they were doing something meaningful.” And since the original passing, large chunks of the coast have been removed from the regulation, including most of the Louisiana coast from the Mississippi River east to the Mississippi state line. “That was by design,” Cresson figures. “Mississippi has a one-mile buffer statewide, so now the Omega Protein boats stationed in Mississippi come to Louisiana waters to fish.”
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Moving forward on menhaden conservation along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts requires both acknowledgement of improvements in the fishery—most particularly in the Atlantic states—and a steadfast commitment to education about the stakes of not conserving fish populations whose ecological importance is only now being incorporated into management, though the science has been clear for a long time. At the moment, the political deck in Louisiana is stacked against meaningful conservation.
But Louisiana governor John Bel Evans can’t seek re-election, so there will be new legislators and a new governor in 2024. “The path forward is to continue fighting the good fight,” figures Cesson. “There is a strong groundswell of support in Louisiana for reasonable regulations in the menhaden fishery. It’s only politics that has stopped us from making progress, and we intend on making this a campaign issue that candidates will have to take a stand on.”
If nothing else, the challenges in Louisiana have helped build a strong coalition to fight for marine resources, says Ralston. The National Audubon Society is looking at the effects of menhaden harvest on birds, and TRCP’s ecosystem perspective is gaining traction. CCA’s emphasis on bycatch and sea bottom habitat issues is finding resonance among many anglers. And BTT’s expertise in science and research is bolstering arguments for greater conservation measures. From the American Sportfishing Association to the National Wildlife Federation and the National Marine Manufacturers Association, “there is a very diverse set of stakeholders in this fight,” Ralston explains, “and when you look at that many different groups, from so many different perspectives, all saying the same thing, and there is one lobby saying the opposite, that makes a strong case for the need for change.”
These are not mom-and-pop shrimping operations, explains Macaluso. These are not sole proprietor watermen out there running crab traps. “These are massive foreign corporations,” he says, “that employ plenty of hard-working local people. Our mission is not to put them out of business, but for there to be more complete understanding of the impact the industry is having.”
An award-winning author and journalist, T. Edward Nickens is editor-at-large of Field & Stream and a contributing editor for Garden & Gun and Audubon magazine.
