MENHADEN: CERTAINTY WITHOUT MUCH SCIENCE

 

The menhaden silly season has gotten underway.

By “silly season,” I mean that time of the year when well-intentioned people come out of the woodwork to make all sorts of claims relating to menhaden management and the species’ role in coastal ecosystems, but have little or no factual support for anything that they choose to say.

What do we actually know about Atlantic menhaden?

We know that it is an important forage species, that helps to support finfish, bird, and marine mammal populations along the entire Atlantic coast of the United States.  We know that all of the menhaden on the East Coast belong to a single stock, that the stock spawns over the continental shelf, and that the older fish engage in long coastwide migrations, although many of them don’t commute between the extremes of the fish’s range, but rather engage in shorter travels—say, Maine to Virginia, or perhaps North Carolina. 

There are a lot more things that we simply suspect.

We suspect that menhaden might be susceptible to localized depletion, although that has never been proven through any sort of objective scientific research.  We also suspect that such localized depletion, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, might be leading to osprey experiencing nesting failure.  And we suspect that the absence of menhaden in places where they were once abundant may be affecting the presence or absence of sharks, striped bass, bluefish, and other predatory fish species.

But due to a lack of sound data, for many aspects of menhaden biology, suspecting is the best that we can do.

Unfortunately, too many menhaden advocates don’t wait for the necessary data to be developed before drawing firm conclusions about menhaden biology and the role that the fish plays in coastal ecosystems.  Thanks to a recent vote in the Virginia state legislature, that information is being gathered right now, although from a practical perspective, it probably won’t be completely collated, analyzed, peer reviewed and, finally, presented to the scientific community for another five years or so.  But the menhaden advocates don’t want to wait, so they’re making some very iffy claims that are based on very little hard science.

Thus, down in the Chesapeake Bay, we’re seeing a group that calls itself the Southern Maryland Recreational Fishing Organization planning to sue Virginia—again—over what the Organization alleges is poor menhaden management.  

It had sued once before, using the Chesapeake Legal Alliance, a non-profit legal group, as counsel, but the Court failed to hand down a decision soon enough to make a difference in that season’s harvest, although the Court seemed interested in the arguments that the Organization was making.

The planned lawsuit will make arguments similar to those made the last time around—that Virginia’s approach to menhaden management violates section 28.2-203 of the Virgina Code, which requires, among other things, that, in state fishery management plans,

“Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing while achieving the optimum yield from each fishery...”

while also being

“based upon the best scientific, economic, biological and sociological information available.”

The Organization is apparently claiming that the large-scale menhaden reduction fishery, which is responsible for most of the commercial menhaden landings, should not be permitted to fish in state waters, but rather should be pushed at least three miles offshore, into federal waters, because the state waters fishery

“threatens both the ecological health of the Bay and the livelihoods of commercial and recreational fishermen who depend on menhaden predators like striped bass.”

Unfortunately, they can’t support that allegation with any sort of hard data; the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, in its recently released Draft Addendum II to Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden for Public Comment, admitted that

“Sufficient scientific data are not available to satisfactorily address the potential for localized depletion in the Bay or to identify specific reasons for predator finfish deficiencies or low larval menhaden recruitment…”

So it is hard to understand how the Organization can claim that Virginia isn’t using “the best scientific…information available” when it established its menhaden regulations, since the best scientific information available doesn’t establish the existence of localized menhaden depletion within the Chesapeake Bay.

The case for menhaden reductions within the Bay causing osprey nest failures is nearly as hard to make, although that hasn’t stopped various organizations involved with menhaden advocacy from trying to make it, in arguments that go well beyond what can be proven today. That debate really started when a team of scientists published a paper titled “Widespread reproductive deficits in Chesapeake Bay ospreys” in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science last May.

The paper concluded that

“Although several factors may influence osprey productivity within the Chesapeake Bay, we suggest that reduced availability of Atlantic menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus) is a primary driver of poor reproductive performance within high-salinity waters.”

However, the researchers also noted that

“Several documented and suspected factors other than food stress could be contributing to nest failures within the Chesapeake Bay including stressors that influence clutch/brood survival (nest predators, weather, contaminants) and those that may disrupt breeding (nest competitors, disease),”

although they later argued against many of those factors contributing to current nest failures, and observed that

“Nesting ospreys within the higher salinity reaches of the Chesapeake Bay are believed to be menhaden dependent.  Menhaden are a schooling fish with a very high energy density making them efficient to capture and ideal for brood-rearing.  Broad patterns in food-stress metrics and reproductive deficits in 2024 suggest that menhaden abundance was inadequate to support a stable population.”

 Still, the paper’s authors, like the ASMFC, admitted that

“The impact of harvest on the abundance of adult menhaden within the Chesapeake Bay remains controversial primarily because we do not have the abundance data required to evaluate the relationship between harvest and menhaden abundance.”

Despite such caveats, the menhaden advocates and those opposed to the reduction fishery—there is substantial overlap between those two groups—latched onto the paper and used it as “evidence” that maintaining a reduction fishery withing the bay was bad not only for menhaden, but for osprey and the many other species that regularly feed on menhaden.

That has led to some criticism of the paper itself.

One such criticism recently appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, in which the author said,

“As a commercial fisherman from Maine, I was troubled by the Washington Post’s article about menhaden and starving osprey chicks in Chesapeake Bay.  It presents a simple story: commercial fishermen catch menhaden, osprey lose their food, and chicks starve.  It is compelling.  It just is not what the science proves.”

Just what the science proves—rather than merely suggests—isn’t quite clear.  What is clear is that we shouldn’t be blaming osprey nesting failure on menhaden harvest within the Chesapeake Bay until we have enough data to justify the claim.

The third and most recent example of blaming the menhaden fishery for problems popping up along the coast comes from right here in New York, where a member of New York City’s City Council has written to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, asking him to push the reduction fishery 12 miles offshore along the entire East Coast.

According to the website qns.com,

“[City Council member Joann] Ariola warned Lutnick that the overharvesting of menhaden populations—commonly known as bunker—in waters off Jamaica Bay and the Rockaway Peninsula may be contributing to increased shark sightings near New York City beaches, which she claimed was having a detrimental impact on local economies…

“’My constituents can watch menhaden being removed from the ocean just beyond New York’s jurisdiction, but neither they nor the state can reach across that line and stop it,’ Ariola said in a statement.  ‘Only the federal government can close this dangerous loophole.’

“In her letter to Lutnick, Ariola wrote that there was a ‘growing body of evidence’ that sharks are coming closer to shore as a result of decreased menhaden populations beyond the three-mile buffer.  Increased shark sightings, she said, had led to numerous beach closings in the Rockaways over the summer.”

Because this one deals with events more-or-less in my home waters, I can pick out the false statements pretty easily.  To begin, the big reduction boats rarely fish off New York.  It’s a matter of simple economics, for the farther they travel from their Virginia processing facility, the more they have to pay in fuel and other costs; as a rule, the reduction fleets rarely travel north of New Jersey, although they might appear off western Long Island every now and then.  But to say that her “constituents…watch menhaden being removed from the ocean just beyond New York’s jurisdiction” certainly overstates the situation.

So does then claim that “sharks are coming closer to shore as a result of decreased menhaden populations beyond the three-mile buffer.” 

Sharks have always been a part of New York’s coastal ecosystems, and the fish that people are now seeing close to shore—sand tigers, sandbars, duskies, spinners, blacktips, and the occasional small white—are the same species that people have been seeing close to shore for the last few centuries.  I’ve been shark fishing off New York for the last few centuries.  They’re not coming in closer because of an absence of schooling baitfish, but rather because there have been enough menhaden inshore that the sharks can shadow the bait schools that swim just beyond then surfline and still be assured of catching a meal without having to work very hard to do it.  Videos from drones flown from the beach frequently show sandbars, sand tigers, spinners and occasionally blacktips and whites keeping pace with the schools that provide feeding opportunities. 

Far from what Councilwoman Ariola seems to be claiming—that a dearth of menhaden offshore has forced sharks to come closer to New York beaches—the truth is that there have always been a lot of sharks, and a lot of menhaden, swimming very close to shore.  Although there have been days when I ran into big schools of menhaden a dozen miles off the beach, those days have been far less common than the days when I saw far the ocean dark with menhaden in less than 75 feet of water.  So in reality, I expect to find more blacktips, spinners, and small whites in those shallow depths than I would in my more usual 100 to 240-foot fishing  depths.

So, Councilwoman Ariola is also creating a false narrative based on inadequate, inaccurate information gleaned off the Internet rather than by spending time on the water and perusing scientific journals.  In doing so, she contributes to the misunderstandings that people have about menhaden, and helps to perpetuate the current lay view that menhaden are facing some kind of crisis.

She’s certain enough of her views to urge a federal cabinet secretary to accept her point of view as gospel, without first reaching out to the scientists who might be in a better place to judge whether that point of view is valid.

But it is just that sort of unjustified certainty that has shape the menhaden debate for the past decade or so, a debate driven by emotion rather than by data, which is unlikely to serve either the menhaden or the menhaden fisheries very well.