JUST OUT: AN OBJECTIVE LOOK AT BYCATCH IN THE MENHADEN REDUCTION FISHERY

 

Anglers often like to throw (mostly metaphorical) stones at commercial fishermen, and every angler has a favorite target.

Some have a particular antipathy toward gillnetters, while others abhor folks who pull trawls.  Longliners, whether pelagic or bottom, have their share of critics, as do haul seiners, harpooners, and even those who earn their pay fishing with hook and line.  The hostility can vary by region, or the fish targeted.  Every angler has their own idea of what makes a commercial fishery particularly vile.  They often disagree.

Except when it comes to the menhaden reduction fishery, which has managed to attract the slings and arrows of just about every recreational fisherman, environmental advocates, and even some members of the commercial fleet.  And when you stop to think about it, that’s probably not surprising, because if you’re looking for a fishery to despise, the menhaden reduction fishery offers something for just about everyone.

Start with the fact that all of the menhaden reduction fishing in the United States is done by just two companies, Alpha VesselCo LLC,which does business under the name “Ocean Harvesters” and operates in both the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, and Daybrook Fisheries, which fishes solely in the Gulf.  Both operations are, at least for the fishing industry, large and heavily capitalized corporations, and certainly the antithesis of what might be called an “artisanal” fishery.  

Thus, the companies are a natural target for those who might sympathize with hardscrabble fishermen trying to make a living from the sea, but are philosophically opposed to “industrial fishing,” large corporations and the lobbyists, political connections, and financial influence that is carried along in their wake.

Taking things a step farther, the menhaden reduction operations are not completely domestic, but instead are operated by U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations.  While Alpha VesselCo owns and operates the 30 purse seine vessels that actually catch the menhaden, such vessels were originally owned by Omega Protein, which had to divest its fleet after it was acquired by, and became a division of, Cooke Inc., one of the world’s largest seafood and aquaculture companies, which is located in New Brunswick, Canada.  A long-term contract to supply menhaden to Omega Protein effectively ties Alpha VesselCo to Omega, even though the company is legally an independent entity.

Daybrook Fisheries is owned by the Oceana Group, a South African company specializing in fishing, fish products, and aquaculture.

Thus, although the people who are actually doing the fishing are United States residents, the foreign connection makes both Omega and Daybrook targets not only for those who don’t like large corporations, but also for those who don’t like the idea of “foreigners” harvesting fish in United States waters.  It’s a line you often hear from folks who want to shut down the reduction fishery, with one anti-reduction industry group going so far as to post on its website

“Who will win?  A Foreign Industrial Conglomerate or America.”

Of course, a fish neither knows nor cares who kills it, it is merely dead.  If one reduction fleet vessel ends up killing 1,500,000 menhaden on any given day (the Alpha VesselCo boats can hold between 1.3 and 2 million fish at any one time), or if 150 pound netters and smaller “bait” purse seiners kill just 10,000 menhaden each, the net result is still 1.5 million dead menhaden removed from the ecosystem.

But there’s something about the big reduction boats that draws a disproportionate amount of folks’ ire.

And it doesn’t help that at least one of the big operators, Omega Protein, has long maintained a sort of institutional arrogance, flaunting its political connections and openly defying decisions of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board. 

People tend to get upset about that sort of thing.

But from a policy perspective, what matters isn’t who gets their feelings hurt, or who might dislike large-scale fisheries, but whether those fisheries do any lasting harm to marine resources and marine ecosystems.  In that regard, the reduction fishery has come in for a lot of criticism, but as heated as that criticism might be, it rests on shaky factual foundations.

One organization, called “Save Our Menhaden,” has a fairly well-designed website (which nonetheless fails to disclose the name of even one of the people managing, directing, and/or financing such organization) urges people to

“Harass the ASMFC Menhaden Board,”

claiming, contrary to easily located information, that

“These are the folks who are in charge of setting limits and restrictions on industrial menhaden reduction fishing on the Atlantic Coast.  So far they have done nothing but sit on their hands and ignore all calls for a solution.  Give them your two cents by making a call or sending an email.”

In fact, the ASMFC’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board constantly monitors both the state of the menhaden stock and level of menhaden harvest, including the harvest of the reduction fishery.  In 2006, despite the lack of any data suggesting that the move was needed, it imposed a precautionary harvest cap of 109,020 metric tons on the reduction fishery in the Chesapeake Bay, a cap that, despite a continuing lack of data justifying such action, was more than cut in half, to 51,000 metric tons, in 2017.

The Management Board also conducts regular stock assessments of the Atlantic menhaden resource, which utilize so-called “ecological reference points” that measure stock health in terms of the menhaden’s ability to fulfill its role as a forage fish.  The most recent full, or “benchmark,” stock assessment found that Atlantic menhaden biomass was above its target level, and that fishing mortality was below target, meaning that the stock was both completely healthy and on a favorable trajectory.  A stock assessment update released in 2022 came to the same conclusions.

Thus, any claims that the reduction fishery is doing harm to Atlantic menhaden stocks, or rendering the Atlantic menhaden stock unable to perform its ecological role as a forage fish, are without scientific support.

Although that doesn’t prevent folks from making such claims, particularly when they get paid to do so.

Critics of the reduction fishery have also claimed that the fishery generates high levels of bycatch, leading to the death and subsequent waste of a substantial number of non-target species, including many valued food and sport fish.

The reduction industry tries to minimize the issue, arguing that the bycatch level in the Atlantic menhaden fishery is less than one percent.  Still, one percent of 1.2 billion pounds of menhaden landings adds up to a substantial number.

And the reduction fishery certainly generates some bycatch.  When I was still living in Connecticut back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the big purse seiners often came all the way into western Long Island Sound, where their nets sometimes dragged across the bottom.  For a while, relations between anglers and the purse seiners weren’t too bad, and recreational fishermen were known to go up to the purse seine boats and ask for a bucket of menhaden, perhaps in exchange for a six-pack of Schaeffer, Piels, or some other cheap beer, so that they wouldn’t have to catch their own bait.  I know of at least one occasion when the bucket was returned full of weakfish rather than menhaden, mute testimony to the bycatch that was then taking place.

More recently, a purse seiner operating within the Chesapeake Bay incidentally caught and killed a number of big red drum, an incident that received quite a bit of publicity at the time.

So we know such things happen.  What we didn’t know was how often they happen, with anglers tending to think that bycatch is out of control, while the menhaden industry argues that it is negligible.

This week, a new study financed by the State of Louisiana provided one of the first good looks at bycatch in the reduction fleet.  It found that the reduction fleet in the Gulf of Mexico does have a substantial incidental catch, but not one large enough to have a material impact on important sport fish species.

Observers providing data for the study sampled 418 of the 13,144 sets made by menhaden reduction vessels in Louisiana waters during 2024—about 3.2 percent of the total—spread out across the fishing season.  The characteristics of the sampled sets, including depth, water temperature, and dissolved oxygen, were similar to those of all sets made by the reduction fleet.

Bycatch composition and survival rates differed depending on how fish interacted with the fishing gear.  Once a purse seine is set and drawn tight, the menhaden are removed by means of a 10-inch suction hose.  The head of that hose, which is lowered into the fish packed into the seine, is surrounded by a metal cage which limits the size of the fish that can enter the system.  At the other end of the hose, where fish are deposited into the vessel’s hold, there is a screen designed to divert bycatch into a chute and back into the water.  As a result, only menhaden and smaller fish taken as bycatch end up in the hold.

The study places all reduction fleet bycatch into one of three categories:  1) Rollover Bycatch, which are fish too large to fit through the cage fitted around the end of the suction hose, 2) Chute Bycatch, which are fish that are sucked up into the hose, but are later deflected back into the ocean rather than deposited into the vessel’s fish hold, and 3) Retained Bycatch, which is bycatch that goes into the fish hold along with the menhaden.

As one might expect, survival varies among bycatch types.

Rollover Bycatch has the highest survival rate, which seems reasonable given that all such fish remain in the net until released, and any harm suffered is a result of their limited ability to move in the packed purse seine, or of them being physically compressed by the other fish crowded into the net.

Of the 418 observed sets, 43—a little over 10 percent—had no Rollover Bycatch at all.  The average set resulted in a Rollover Bycatch of 11 individual fish, which might belong to any of 43 different species, although the amount of Rollover Bycatch varied widely by set, and ranged from zero to 128 individuals.  The study’s authors estimated that, for all reduction vessels fishing off Louisiana in 2024, Rollover Bycatch amounted to very slightly more than 145,000 individual fish, having a total weight of a little over 3.25 million pounds.

Five species accounted for two-thirds of the Rollover Bycatch, when measured in numbers of fish, and 52.8 percent when measured by weight:  cownose rays (estimated at 26,847 individuals/538,000 pounds across all sets made in 2024), red drum (26,752 individuals/575,500 pounds), black drum (18,680 individuals/319,000 pounds), gafftopsail catfish (13,809 individuals/40,000 pounds), and crevalle jack (10,525 individuals/260,000 pounds).  Various requiem sharks, of the genus Carcharhinus, accounted for 22.3 percent of the Rollover Bycatch by number, and 44.1 percent by weight.

The likelihood that individuals caught as bycatch would survive is linked to the fishes’ condition.  A fish exhibiting vigorous body movements and no external injuries was deemed to be in “excellent” condition.  Fish with weak body movements and/or with only minor external injuries were deemed to be in “good” or “fair” condition, while those with no body movement, but still moving their gill covers, and/or with serious external injuries were considered to be in “poor” condition.  Mortality was signaled by no body or gill cover movement, major external injuries and/or clear signs of death.

Most of the Rollover Bycatch was released in “excellent” or “good” condition, although that varied from species to species.  Of the important food and sport fish, 95.9 percent of the red drum were released in either “excellent” or “good” condition, with 70.4 percent falling into the “excellent” category.  Black drum reacted similarly, with 95 percent released in either “good” or “excellent” condition, and 80.7 percent rated “excellent.”  However, crevalle jack didn’t fare quite as well, with only 71 percent falling into the top two categories (just 22.1 percent rated “excellent”), while 19.1 percent were returned to the water dead.  Sharks, as a group, fared even worse, with 34.9 percent of spinner sharks and 27.9 percent of blacktip sharks dead when removed from the net.

Chute Bycatch saw far higher mortality rates, and far fewer fish released in either “excellent” or even “good” condition.  It was sampled in 414 of the 418 observed sets, and the good news is that out of those 414 sampled sets, 117—about 28 percent—had no Chute Bycatch at all.  Across all sampled sets, the average Chute Bycatch was 10.6 individuals, with the number in any given set ranging from zero to 220.  The researchers estimated that, across all sets made in Louisiana waters in 2024, Chute Bycatch totalled about 139,470 fish, belonging to 41 different species and weighing a total of 1.6 million pounds.

Five species of fish, four of which dominated the Rollover Bycatch as well, accounted for 80.7 percent of the individual fish in the Chute Bycatch, and 80 percent of the Chute Bycatch weight.  They included gafftopsail catfish (49,780 individuals/142,000 pounds), cownose ray (29,094 individuals/434,000 pounds), red drum (17,841 individuals/332,000 pounds), blacktip shark (8,818 individuals/268,500 pounds), and black drum (6,957 individuals/50,927 pounds).  Another five species—striped mullet, crevalle jack, sand seatrout, hardhead catfish, and finetooth shark accounted for another 13.4 percent of the Chute Bycatch when measured by number, and 10.2 percent when measured by weight.

Likely survival of the Chute Bycatch was not good.  81.9 percent of the blacktip sharks, 60.5 percent of the red drum, and 43.6 percent of the black drum were returned to the water dead.  Only about two percent of the red and black drum, and none of the blacktips, were in “excellent” condition when released.

And, of course, when it came to the Retained Bycatch, no fish survived at all.

415 of the 418 observed sets were sampled for Retained Bycatch.  All had some retained bycatch, with the average set having a Retained Bycatch of 59.8 individuals.  Across all sets made off Louisiana in 2024, Retained Bycatch was estimated to be 145.5 million individuals, belonging to 62 different species, and weighing an estimated aggregate of 23.1 million pounds.  Just four species accounted for 84.3 percent of the Retained Bycatch when gauged by individual animals, and 51 percent when measured by weight:  Atlantic croaker (80,592,690 individuals/5,478,000 pounds), sand seatrout (24,750,238 individuals/4,299,000 pounds), spot (11,685,469 individuals/1,501,000 pounds), and white shrimp (5,699,563 individuals/346,000 pounds).  Gafftopsail catfish accounted for another 16.8 percent of the catch by weight (3,830,000 pounds).

So, from a conservation/fisheries management perspective, what should we make of it all?

The study found that total bycatch, both dead and released alive, equaled about 3.59 percent of the reduction fleet’s catch when measured by weight, and 4.57 percent when measured by number.  Of that, retained bycatch equaled 2.98 percent of the fleet’s overall landings.

The big question is how the most popular sport and food fish were impacted by reduction fleet bycatch.  The study found that out of 44,593 red drum and 25,637 black drum taken as bycatch, 22,805 of the former and 16,551 of the latter survived—survival rates of 51.1 percent and 64.6 percent respectively. 

With respect to red drum and spotted seatrout, arguably Louisiana’s most important inshore sport fish species, the study found that

Ø  “Mortality estimates for Red Drum (in numbers) are not significantly different from those previously estimated by [the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries], however, the…study provided average weights of the Red Drum from the bycatch, which were not previously available.  These weights, physically taken from the bycatch, resulted in a higher total poundage of dead Red Drum, despite the total numbers being very similar to LDWF estimates.”

Ø  “Mortality estimates of Spotted Seatrout are higher than previously estimated by LDWF, as the…study does a more effective job of accounting for retained catch, which was not accounted for well in previous bycatch work upon which previous LDWF estimates were based.”

And, in what is the most significant finding,

Ø  “Despite the larger poundage of both Red Drum and Spotted Seatrout in menhaden bycatch, the stock status and length of time for stocks to approach management targets are likely to remain unchanged; however, the characterization and proportion of removals will change within the assessment.  [emphasis added]”

Are the results of the Louisiana study transferrable to other areas?  The answer is probably yes elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, where the fishery is generally prosecuted in shallow waters, with an average depth of just 15 feet of water, and rarely if ever deeper than 55 feet.  It’s not clear whether the answer will be the same on the Atlantic coast where, with the exception of some sets made in the Chesapeake Bay, much of the fishing takes place in the ocean, in federal waters more than three miles from shore, where the species mix is very different from what it is in the Gulf, and the purse seines remain above the bottom.

Yet, regardless of the study’s results, both sides of the reduction fishery debate—the menhaden industry and the broad array of foundation-funded organizations, consultants, public relations firms and others who are being paid to shut the industry down, in whole or in part—are already spinning the study’s findings to support their own arguments.

The Menhaden Fisheries Coalition, a group that includes the two big reduction fleets among its members, has declared that

“The study reaffirms what decades of science have consistently shown:  Louisiana’s Gulf menhaden fishery is sustainable, selective, and not a threat to red drum populations.”

On the other hand, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a long-time opponent of the reduction fishery, responded to the study’s findings with a press release that shouted,

“Data suggest 22,000 or more mature redfish and a host of other sportfish, forage fish killed annually by pogy boats off Louisiana.”

Ben Landry, speaking on behalf of Ocean Harvesters/Alpha VesselCo, elaborated on the industry’s position by noting,

“The study confirmed much of what we’ve seen firsthand—high survival rates when fish remain in the net and gains from gear improvements.  We didn’t wait to act.  As soon as the science came in, we upgraded our entire fleet’s gear to reflect its findings.  It’s another step forward in our long-standing commitment to responsible, sustainable fishing,”

which may be a little bit of an overstatement with respect to upgrading the “entire fleet’s gear,” as the study noted that there is substantial variation in the cage that prevents larger fish from being sucked up the suction hose; some hoses are affixed with narrow-slatted cages that allow relatively little bycatch to pass through, while others have cages with much wider gaps that are far from state of the art, and lead to higher levels of bycatch mortality.  Most have excluder cages that fit somewhere between those two extremes.

So there’s certainly room for at least a little improvement on the industry’s side.

At the same time, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s Chris Macaluso, the director of its Center for Fisheries and Mississippi River Programs, fretted that

“The results are concerning, especially given the efforts underway for the last year to make Louisiana’s redfish population healthier by ending the recreational harvest of large, breeding-size redfish.”

Yet, while the 22,000 or so red drum killed each year as by bycatch in the reduction fishery aren’t insignificant, they pale beside the nearly 750,000 red drum landed by Louisiana’s recreational fishermen each year.  So if Mr. Macaluso is truly concerned with red drum conservation, it would seem that his time would be better spent asking that additional restrictions—perhaps cutting one fish off the bag limit, or narrowing the current slot size limit by an inch or two—be placed on the recreational fishery, rather than worrying about the menhaden fleet which, when all is said and done, kills less than 3 percent of the fish that are removed from Lousiana’s red drum population each year by its recreational fishermen.

Regardless of how many studies are released, it's unlikely that the menhaden industry and its many antagonists are going to stop taking shots at each other any time soon.

But, thanks to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fish and the study that it commissioned, we finally have some good science that provides an objective look at reduction fleet bycatch, which should allow regulators to cut through the noise and adopt regulations based on fact, and not someone’s fancy.