MAKING SENSE OF MENHADEN MANAGEMENT

 

Menhaden management has been a hot issue in fisheries management over the past couple of years, and that’s probably not unexpected, as it’s hard to recall a time when some sort of menhaden controversy wasn’t on the table.

Back in the early 1970s, when I was just out of high school and fishing in the western end of Long Island Sound, the presence of the “bunker boats”—purse seiners from various operations that were eventually consolidated into the company that became Omega Protein—was outraging anglers because “they’re taking all the bait” and destroying lobster traps and other fixed gear, leading some folks to do things like sink engine blocks chained to grapnels, in the hope that they’d tangle and destroy any seines that got to close to the bottom of the Sound.

When I got involved in fisheries management at the national level, about 30 years ago, menhaden was still a hot issue.  Back then, it was all about transforming the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board and related bodies, which were then completely controlled by the menhaden industry, into independent scientific and management panels similar to those used for all of the other ASMFC-managed species.  Conservation and recreational fisheries groups joined together, put in a lot of work, and eventually achieved their goal in 2001, with the adoption of Amendment 1 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.

Since then, menhaden debates were largely about how many fish could be safely removed from the population without causing harm.

In 2006, as a purely precautionary measure, the Management Board adopted Addendum II to Amendment 1 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden, which capped the amount of menhaden that might be removed from the Chesapeake Bay.  The intent was to prevent localized depletion of the menhaden resource, even though localized depletion has never been formally documented in the Bay or anywhere else.  That so-called “Bay Cap” has been reduced in later management actions, the most recent being a reduction to 51,000 metric tons—less than half the original cap—in 2017, with the adoption of Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.

Such reductions were made even though localized depletion had still not been convincingly documented.

Amendment 3 also set the stage for the use of ecological reference points, which would allow menhaden managers to consider the species’ role as a forage fish, and manage it to accord with the needs of predators, particularly the striped bass, and not merely for single-species sustainability.

As one might suspect, all of those years of controversy and debate resulted in a lot of people getting emotionally invested in the menhaden issue, something that only got worse after 2008, when author H. Bruce Franklin wrote The Most Important Fish in the Sea, a well-written but perhaps not entirely accurate book about Atlantic menhaden, its ecological role, and the impacts of the menhaden fishery.  That volume captured the imagination of a surprising number of people, turning them into advocates for more restrictive menhaden management.

And the investment wasn’t merely emotional.  A lot of the big foundations that provide grants to various conservation groups were concerned about maintaining intact marine ecosystems, and part of that concern involved maintaining populations of forage fish, including menhaden, that were large enough to supply predators’ needs.  Those foundations were willing to fund menhaden advocacy initiatives, and the promise of at least semi-reliable funding inspired many conservation groups to keep menhaden management at the top of their agendas.  That, in turn, funded more than a few consultants who, over the course of a couple of decades, were able to pay their mortgages and feed their families, in large part from the money they generated from menhaden-related work.

Menhaden became what I call a “political fish,” which results in the management debates being largelyn driven by emotion and ideology rather than by dispassionate scientific analysis, a situation that makes any intelligent discussion of the issues more difficult to conduct.

Thirty years after I first got involved in the menhaden debate, some things—particularly, the fishery management plan—have changed, but some things remain very much the same.

People are still claiming that the menhaden reduction fleet is catching up all the baitfish.  Menhaden advocates still tend to sensationalize, and distort, the facts.  The reduction fishery continues to be demonized.  There are still debates over the size of the Chesapeake Bay cap.  And emotional, ideological arguments are still getting in the way of rational management action.

There is also one very big change, that just occurred over the past year.

The most recent menhaden stock assessment found that menhaden fecundity—the number of eggs produced, which is used as a proxy for spawning stock biomass—is substantially less than previously believed, and that the fishing mortality rate is substantially higher.  

Anecdotal evidence coming from fishermen all along the coast suggest that most of the menhaden they’re seeing are unusually small, perhaps one- or two-year-old fish.  Such truncation of the age/size structure is often a symptom of too many fish being removed from the population.

While the stock is neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing—yet—landings need to be substantially cut to get them back to the target level.

On the afternoon of August 5, the Atlantic Menhaden Management Board will meet for its summer meeting.  It’s not going to discuss a cut in menhaden landings—it’s saving that debate for October.  Instead, it is going to spend almost all of the meeting debating, perfecting, and hopefully approving a new Draft Addendum II to Amendment 3 of the Atlantic Menhaden Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Public Comment.

Draft Addendum II is all about managing the menhaden reduction fishery in Virginia’s section of the Chesapeake Bay, which are possibly the only inland waters on the Atlantic Coast where the reduction boats are still allowed to operate.

The proposed “Statement of the Problem” in the Draft Addendum provides a good idea of what the document hopes to address.

“The availability of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay may be affected by changes in total abundance, size distribution of the population, and timing of spatial distribution in the Bay, which can be caused by fishing pressure, environmental conditions, habitat sustainability and/or changing predator pressures on a limited spatial and temporal scale.  Such changes in menhaden availability may affect the species’ ability to fulfill its ecological and/or economic functions.  Recent observations of below average commercial fisheries landings and concerning population trends in several species that use menhaden as prey within Chesapeake Bay suggest that availability of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay may be changing due to one or more of the above drivers…  [emphasis added]”

So we know that there seem to be problems in the Chesapeake Bay, with respect to menhaden abundance and distribution, commercial menhaden landings, and perhaps menhaden availability to predators, but we also know that there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the existence and the causes of those issues.  Thus, the above statement uses a lot of hedging language—“may” appears three times and “can” appears once over the course of just three long sentences—without a single statement that uses words like “does,” “causes,” and “will”, which would clearly allege a relationship between menhaden and any of the problematic conditions.

The information just isn’t there.

Thus, the Draft Addendum also notes that

“there are currently not sufficient scientific data available to comprehensively characterize the abundance and distribution of menhaden throughout Chesapeake Bay and the influence of fishing pressure on menhaden.”

That puts the Management Board in a bind, because many members are reluctant to impose more restrictive management measures on the menhaden fishery when there isn’t clear scientific evidence suggesting that those measures are needed.

The Commonwealth of Virginia has recently agreed to fund a menhaden study that ought to provide some of the badly needed answers, but good research doesn’t happen overnight.  A very experienced fisheries manager, with an intimate knowledge of the Chesapeake Bay, recently told me that results of the research might not be published for five years or so.

Meanwhile, managers are effectively flying blind with respect to Bay-specific menhaden issues.

 

That being the case, an argument can certainly be made that managers should match high levels of uncertainty with high levels of precaution when adopting management measures.  It is far too easy to overlook a threat to the stock when the information on hand is ambiguous—if the relevant information exists at all.

The current 51,000 metric ton cap on the reduction fishery in the Chesapeake Bay is the prime example of the Management Board adopting a precautionary management measure in the face of uncertain and/or nonexistent data.

The Draft Addendum would perpetuate such precautionary approach, while addressing three intertwined issues.

The first of those is how to deal with the Bay Cap.  Currently, the Cap is arbitrarily set at 51,000 metric tons, and is not directly related to the overall annual catch limit; when the ACL was reduced by 20% last fall, the Bay Cap didn’t change.

Intuitively, that seems wrong. 

An initial, gut reaction would probably suggest that if the overall annual catch limit is cut, the Bay Cap should be cut by a similar percentage.  If fewer menhaden need to be removed from the ocean, it seems sensible to also remove fewer menhaden from the Chesapeake Bay.  The Draft Addendum reflects such concerns with a pair of options, saying,

“Therefore, this draft addendum considers a one-time reduction in the Bay Cap in consideration of recent or upcoming changes to the TAC and setting the Bay Cap as a proportion of the TAC so that it changes automatically with future changes to the TAC.  [emphasis added]”

To make ingsit clear, because the language is a little ambiguous, the Draft Addendum offers two different options.  One of those options would be a one-time change to the Cap, which would fall into a range somewhere between status quo and a 50% reduction. 

That doesn’t seem unreasonable.  If the Total Allowable Catch is reduced, because too many fish are being landed, it seems reasonable to reduce the Bay Cap, too, so too much of the overall harvest doesn’t take place in the relatively restricted waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

The problem with that sort of one-time reduction is that, if the Bay Cap needs to be reduced again, it will require at least another addendum, and close to a year of time, to get the job done.

To get around that problem, a second option would automatically tie changes in the Bay Cap to changes to the Total Allowable Catch.  The option isn’t as simple as just changing the TAC and the Cap by the same percentage, and there are a couple of permutations to the way the Bay Cap reduction might be achieved.  One, designated Sub-Option C1a-e, would link the change in the Bay Cap to a defined percentage of the overall TAC, within a limited range defined by a high of 27.3%, which represents the current relationship between the TAC and the Bay Cap, and a low value of 13.6%, which represents a 50% reduction in the proportion of overall menhaden landings that might come from the Chesapeake Bay.

While it might seem attractive to have a smaller percentage of the overall catch taken from the Chesapeake Bay, it’s important to note that this option addresses a change to the Bay Cap, not merely a reduction.  Unlike the one-time reduction described earlier, which can only cut the total amount of menhaden removed from the Bay by the reduction fishery, tying the Bay Cap to the TAC means that if the TAC is increased, the Bay Cap will increase, too.  If the TAC is increased enough, the Bay Cap could even exceed its current 51,000 metric tons.

The problem is that, until we know whether local environmental conditions require menhaden in the Chesapeake to be managed differently, and perhaps more conservatively, than the coastwide menhaden stock, matching coastwide increases with increases to the Bay Cap might prove counterproductive.

Sub-Option C2 a-e addresses that issue by discarding the percent-of-overall-TAC approach in favor of upper and lower limits on the Bay Cap.  Options range from the most conservative, which doesn’t allow the Cap to exceed the current 51,000 mt, with no lower limit to what the Bay Cap might be, to the least conservative, which would allow the Cap to increase to 87,216 metric tons, and wouldn’t allow it to decrease below 25,500 mt.

I suspect that all three of those broad options will remain in the Draft Addendum, so that the public can express their preferences, although the Management Board might winnow out a few of the possible choices to make the document a little easier for the public to understand.

In the end, when it comes time for the Management Board to pick one for the final version of Addendum II, I think that, for now, the one-time reduction is the right way to go.  In principle, I heartily agree with something recently published by the American Saltwater Guides Association:

“The Chesapeake Bay is not a scaled-down version of the ocean.  It is a distinct ecological system with its own patterns of localized depletion, its own forage demands from predators, and a long record of concentrated industrial harvest.  Tying the Bay Cap to the ocean quota removes the Board’s ability to manage the Bay independently and on its own scientific merits.  It treats a critical nursery and feeding area as just another line on a spreadsheet.”

Maybe in five years, when the research is done and conclusions are reached, we’ll find that the Chesapeake really is a “scaled-down version of the ocean,” that localized depletion still can’t be proven, and that, no special management measures are needed for the menhaden within the Chesapeake Bay..

Maybe we’ll find just the opposite, and learn that the Bay-specific measures are clearly required.

But until managers have clear scientific guidance on those issues, giving the Board the discretion to manage the Bay as an independent ecosystem will be the right way to go.

A separate option, designated Option 3.3, would, if adopted, require the Management Board to revisit the Bay Cap every three years, to ensure that it remains at an appropriate level.  That seems to make sense, and hopefully, the Management Board will keep it in the Draft Addendum and, eventually, in the final version of Addendum II.

Finally, the Draft Addendum asks whether the reduction fishery should be free to catch the entire Bay Cap in a relatively short period, should the fish be available, or whether the season should be broken down into three separate periods, each with its own quota.  The latter option is proposed, because the Management Board perceived a

“potential for a concentration of reduction fishery landings in a short time period, as seen in 2023 and 2024, when over 50% of the Bay reduction fishery landings were taken in a 6-week period in mid-summer.  When this occurs, it is possible that these higher-than-normal catch rates could affect the availability of menhaden to other fisheries or predators, which is what the Bay Cap was intended to prevent.  [emphasis added]”

Once again, because of a lack of hard information, the Draft Addendum has to use speculative language, because no one really knows whether concentrating menhaden landings in a relatively short period of time is doing any harm at all.  And once again, because of a lack of good data, a precautionary approach is probably justified.

It could be argued that the Plan Development Team made the seasonal quota options a little more complicated than it needed to, for along with simply dividing the season into trimesters, with each trimester quota amounting to one-third of the Cap, they also provided an option described as “Even Length and Uneven Harvest,” which kept the relatively uniform trimesters, but allocated 50% of the potential landings to the last third of the season, and another option described as “Uneven Length and Even Harvest,” which broke up the season into three periods, of 11 weeks, six weeks, and 11 weeks and five days, respectively, with one-third of the Bay Cap allocated to each one.

Those who would like to reduce the overall landings from the Chesapeake Bay might see some real virtue in Option B2, Even Length and Uneven Harvest, as limiting landings during each of the first two trimesters to 25% of the Bay Cap would probably force the reduction fleet into the ocean and out of the Bay earlier than would the other two options, and at least open up the possibility that the fleet would land something close to its overall TAC while participating in the ocean fishery, making it unnecessary to land the full 50% of the Bay Cap at the tail end of the season, when reduction fishing activity is typically at its lowest point of the year.

While that outcome may be wishful thinking, it still might make Option B2 the frontrunner once the public comment period begins.

On the other hand, there seems to be little virtue in Option B3, Uneven Length and Even Harvest, as one of the seeming motivations for proposing seasonal quotas was the fact that “over 50% of the Bay reduction fishery landings were taken in a 6-week period in mid-summer” in 2023 and 2024, and one of the things that Option B3 does is create a 6-week-long mid-summer season when 33% of the landings would be concentrated.  While 33% is still smaller than “over 50%,” concentrating one-third of the landings in a short 6-week season, and allowing for the real possibility of quota overages if the fish are readily available, Option B3 seems to risk perpetuating a problem the seasonal quotas were supposed to solve.

And as I noted, quota overages are always a real possibility, particularly in large-scale fisheries that can sometimes encounter a lot of menhaden in a relatively short time, and landings reports lag what’s actually happening on the water.

Thus, the Draft Addendum needs to address the issue of quota overages and underages, and the issue of paybacks, for as it observes,

“Without any overage payback provision, there would be little incentive for industry to abide by their in-year quota periods.”

But the Draft Addendum also observes that,

“Without any underage rollover provision, the quota periods may inhibit industry’s ability to harvest the Bay Cap.”

That makes it seem as if paybacks and rollovers are just two different sides of the same coin.  I tend to disagree about that, because a quota—or a Bay Capt—is just what its name suggests, a hard cap that may not be exceeded without consequences.  It is an absolute cap on harvest, not a target that must be achieved. 

Moreover, while there is only one reason why a quota might be exceeded—the industry killed too many fish—there can be many reasons why an underage occurred, including bad weather, environmental conditions keeping menhaden out of the Bay and, most importantly, lowered overall abundance.  And if the latter case proves to be true, allowing the industry to roll over underages into another period, so it can take more fish from a declining biomass, is probably the worst thing to do.

All things considered, the proposal deemed Option A, “No payback for quota period overages with rollover of unused quota within a fishing year,” seems like a particularly bad idea.  The Draft Addendum provides the following rationale:

“There would be no payback for exceeding the allocation of a quota period unless it causes the Bay Cap to be exceeded.  An overage of the total Bay Cap would be deducted from the following year’s Bay Cap before it is allocated into the quota periods.  Any underage of Quota Period 1 or 2 can be used in any subsequent quota period within the year.”

Adopting that option would be perfectly pointless, as it would do nothing to solve the problem that the seasonal quotas were supposed to solve.  Without paybacks for exceeding the seasonal quotas, there would be nothing to stop the industry from catching the majority of the Bay Cap within a 6-week—or shorter—period, and creating exactly those problems that the seasonal quotas were intended to prevent.

I suspect that Option A is intended to be the status quo option for the paybacks issue, even if it is not listed as such, and so will be retained in the Draft Addendum.  But it is nonetheless a very bad idea, and it would be unfortunate if it ended up being the option chosen for the final version of Addendum II.

Unfortunately, underage rollovers seem to be baked into all of the other options, which fortunately also require paybacks of any seasonal overages.  While the underages, unlike paybacks, never roll over into the next fishing year, they could lead to intense fishing effort, during the last one or two trimesters, on what might prove to be an unexpectedly low concentration of fish. 

That’s not the best outcome, but it certainly isn’t a deal-killer.  On balance, Draft Addendum II, as it currently stands, contains reasonable and worthwhile provisions that would promote the sort of precautionary management approach that is appropriate until such time as the research is done and more data-based solutions can be considered.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Draft Addendum will be approved for public comment next month.

It should be approved, and I believe that the odds favor approval, probably in a form not too different from the current draft.  But I have been involved in menhaden management for far too long, and won’t be surprised if something else happens.

It’s probably predictable that the menhaden reduction industry will object to at least some of the Draft Addendum’s provisions, arguing that the Bay Cap has no scientific support, that reducing the Cap is thus inappropriate and punitive, etc.  Depending on how the various jurisdictions line up—and these days, when the federal agencies are taking a hard stance against conservation measures, that lineup has changed from what it has traditionally been—it is far from impossible that some coalition will unexpectedly form and send the Draft Addendum back to the Plan Development Team for further review.

And it’s probably also predictable that the folks who hang out at the other end of the menhaden circus—the die-hard “most important fish in the sea” crowd, known for their emotional diatribes in all forms of media—are going to say that the Draft Addendum doesn’t go far enough, and might start even claiming, as they have before, that

“THE US FISHERIES CRISIS IS REAL,”

whining about supposedly

“COLLAPSING OCEAN FOOD SYSTEMS”

and

“DEVASTATING COASTAL ECONOMIES,

as they do their best to convince other Management Board members to send the Draft Addendum back to the Plan Development Team, hoping to add additional restrictions on the reduction fleet.

It would be more than a little ironic if the efforts of the menhaden reduction fleet and those vehemently opposed to the menhaden reduction fishery inadvertently combined to stall the progress of the Draft Addendum, but given how ephemeral the alliances have been on the Management Board, such an outcome is not at all unlikely.

But hopefully, it will not happen.

Hopefully, the Draft Addendum will be released for public comment, and provide an opportunity for additional precautionary measures being applied to the menhaden fishery in the Chesapeake Bay.

But even if things work out that way, folks ought to understand that Amendment II is only a sideshow in the bigger picture of menhaden management.

While it would be nice to see a precautionary management approach prevail in the Chesapeake Bay, the real fight will come in October, when the Management Board sets the Total Allowable Catch for the 2027, 2028, and 2029 fishing seasons.  For if the Management Board fails to make meaningful cuts to menhaden harvest, hopefully constraining menhaden landings to or below target levels by 2029, the sustainability of the Atlantic menhaden stock, including the fish that might sojourn in Chesapeake Bay, will be placed in substantial peril.

And that’s something that Draft Addendum II just can’t fix on its own.