Doublerunner
01-25-2010, 12:06 PM
Taken from another site; I've also posted this on a facebook group called "Make Striped Bass a Gamefish"
Menhaden - an oily, bony baitfish - attracts more than stripers and bluefish. It attracts Virginia lawmakers by the score.
Omega Protein, which harvests menhaden for industrial purposes and processes them in Reedville, has carved out the privileged status of having its fishery in the Chesapeake Bay regulated by politicians to whom it gives thousands of dollars in donations each year.
The commercial exploitation of creatures in state waters is ordinarily controlled by the Virginia Marine Resource Commission. The VMRC regulates oysters, blue crabs, striped bass, bluefish, speckled trout and much, much more. What it doesn't regulate - by law - is menhaden, one of the largest commercial catches in Virginia waters. Instead, the fishery is the only one overseen by the General Assembly, where marine scientists are in short supply.
That's a problem. Menhaden are voracious filter feeders and once were common as pebbles in the Chesapeake Bay.
They cleaned the Bay's waters and fed all kinds of bigger fish.
Menhaden are considered so critical to the ecosystem of the East Coast and the food chain that author Bruce Franklin titled his book, "The Most Important Fish in the Sea." Allowing the company that profits from the fish, and its lawmakers, to decide how many Omega should catch is the equivalent of letting foxes decide how many chickens to keep in the henhouse.
Still, the General Assembly has refused to cede oversight of menhaden to VMRC. Omega is now subject to a compromise between state and federal regulators that allows the company to take 100,000 metric tons of menhaden a year in the Chesapeake. The company has come nowhere near that cap, a fact that environmentalists cite as proof of overfishing and company officials cite as proof of caution.
Most likely it's proof that the company - the only one working in Virginia - is catching all the menhaden it needs in state waters outside the Bay. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, 160,357 metric tons of menhaden were landed in Virginia in 2008, most from state waters. Virginia and North Carolina are the only East Coast states that permit industrial menhaden fishing.
What isn't clear is whether the species can survive this onslaught. The Bay continues to be plagued by dead zones caused by too much of the algae the creatures can eat; there are signs the fish that prey on menhaden are suffering because their food supplies are dwindling.
Such uncertainty can be traced back to a faulty regime in which lawmakers were asked to regulate a complicated fishery in a complex ecosystem that even experts don't fully understand. Instead of the VMRC, which is supported by the best science and data available and meets every month, menhaden are regulated by lawmakers who meet on a tight two-month calendar and have a million other things to worry about.
Given the thousands of dollars Omega has distributed in Richmond over the years, that's perhaps no surprise. But it is wrong, it is dangerous for the Bay, and it should change.
Sen. Ralph Northam and Del. John Cosgrove have introduced legislation that would properly put menhaden regulation under the VMRC, where it would be governed by science and what's best for the Chesapeake and the fishery. The legislation is likely to face tough opposition in the House of Delegates, where Omega has been especially generous.
As before, their proposals to protect menhaden and the Bay will test the extent to which money serves as bait for lawmakers in Richmond.
DarkSkies
01-25-2010, 12:25 PM
Omega Protein, which harvests menhaden for industrial purposes and processes them in Reedville, has carved out the privileged status of having its fishery in the Chesapeake Bay regulated by politicians to whom it gives thousands of dollars in donations each year.
The commercial exploitation of creatures in state waters is ordinarily controlled by the Virginia Marine Resource Commission. The VMRC regulates oysters, blue crabs, striped bass, bluefish, speckled trout and much, much more. What it doesn't regulate - by law - is menhaden, one of the largest commercial catches in Virginia waters. Instead, the fishery is the only one overseen by the General Assembly, where marine scientists are in short supply.
Allowing the company that profits from the fish, and its lawmakers, to decide how many Omega should catch is the equivalent of letting foxes decide how many chickens to keep in the henhouse.
...Still, the General Assembly has refused to cede oversight of menhaden to VMRC. Omega is now subject to a compromise between state and federal regulators that allows the company to take 100,000 metric tons of menhaden a year in the Chesapeake. The company has come nowhere near that cap, a fact that environmentalists cite as proof of overfishing and company officials cite as proof of caution.
The above paragraphs make me realize how often politics is a dirty business when large sums of $$ are involved.
cowherder
01-27-2010, 10:36 PM
An exerpt from H Bruce Franklin's book, interesting read.
http://home.comcast.net/~sittingbythepool/MENHADENPAGE.html
MENHADEN EXTINTION
Tragic Story Of Decline And Greed
"NET LOSSES"
How a football tycoon took George H.W. Bush's oil company and used it to declare war on the fish that built America.
H. Bruce Franklin
March/April 2006 Issue
IN A 1997 EPISODE OF THE SIMPSONS, evil tycoon C. Montgomery Burns claims that, under the tutelage of relentless environmentalist Lisa Simpson, he’s become a benefactor of society because he sweeps hundreds of millions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into “Lil’ Lisa’s patented animal slurry”—“a high-protein feed for farm animals, insulation for low-income housing, a powerful explosive, and a top-notch engine coolant.” “Best of all,” he boasts, “it’s made from 100 percent recycled animals.”
Few viewers would have realized how closely the episode mirrored reality. Mr. Burns’ real-life counterpart is Malcolm Glazer, a billionaire tycoon who controls Omega Protein, a corporation that claims to benefit society because every year it sweeps hundreds of millions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into high-protein animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in linoleum, soap, lubricants, health-food supplements, cookies, and lipstick.
Omega has only one business, hauling in just one kind of fish and converting it into those industrial commodities. That fish is menhaden, and in 1997, just as Mr. Burns was proudly displaying his loads of ground-up fish, Omega was consolidating its virtual monopoly on what is known as the menhaden “reduction” fishery.
So what problem could there be with using the Mr. Burns process on fish that few people have even heard of and nobody eats because they are too oily and full of bones and smell awful? The problem is that menhaden are the most important fish in North America.
This little fish has long been an integral part of our natural—and national—history. Menhaden were vital to the colonization of North America and the development of 19th-century American agriculture and industry.
Much of the phytoplankton consumed by menhaden consists of algae. Excess nitrogen can make algae grow out of control, and that’s what happens when vast quantities of nitrogen flood into our inshore waters from runoff fed by paved surfaces, roofs, wastewater, overfertilized golf courses and suburban lawns, and industrial poultry and pig farms. This can generate devastating blooms of algae, such as red tide and brown tide, which cause massive fish kills, then sink in thick carpets to the bottom, where they smother plants and shellfish, suck dissolved oxygen from the water, and leave dead zones that expand year by year.
In the natural ecosystem, menhaden cleaned the upper layers while another great filter feeder, the oyster, cleaned the bottom. But as oysters have been driven to near extinction in many Atlantic bays and estuaries by overfishing and pollution, menhaden are left as the only remaining check on deadly phytoplankton explosions. Marine biologist Sara Gottlieb, author of a groundbreaking study on menhaden’s filtering capability, compares their role with the human liver’s: “Just as your body needs its liver to filter out toxins, ecosystems also need those natural filters.” Overfishing menhaden, she says, “is just like removing your liver.”
The Atlantic menhaden industry was booming. By 1949, National Geographic and Life magazine were saluting it with headlines ballyhooing “Uncle Sam’s Top Commercial Fish” and “Biggest Ocean Harvest.” The catch soared year after year, reaching a peak of 1.6 billion pounds in 1956. But not even the fish’s phenomenal fecundity could sustain them under this industrial onslaught. Menhaden usually spawn far out at sea, and spotters were finding schools as far out as 50 miles, some with so many egg-filled females that the nets would come up slimy with roe. Then, inevitably, the catch began to fall. By 1969, it had plummeted almost 80 percent. Looking back ruefully on the role he and other spotter pilots had played in the demise of the species, Watters (who died in 2004 at age 79) told me, “We are what destroyed the fishery, because the menhaden had no place to hide.”
THE COLLAPSE of the Atlantic menhaden industry allowed one company to gain almost exclusive control of the endangered fishery. In 1953, during the heyday of the Atlantic menhaden industry, George H.W. Bush cofounded Zapata Corporation, a wildcatting oil and gas exploration company headquartered in Houston. After Bush sold his stake in Zapata in 1966, the company began to branch out into fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, “wringing oil out of fish,” as one business journal snidely put it. In the early 1990s, reclusive real estate mogul Malcolm Glazer took control of Zapata, installed his son Avram as president and CEO, sold off the company’s oil and gas interests, purchased the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (forcing the city to impose a sales tax, still in effect, to build a grandiose new stadium), and turned Zapata into a mere shell for a subsidiary with a jazzy new name more fit for a health-food company—Omega Protein.
Omega now owns 61 ships and 32 spotter planes. Only 10 of the ships and seven of the planes—all based at the company’s factory complex in Reedville, Virginia—still operate on the Atlantic coast. And there Omega has big problems.
As Atlantic menhaden have declined, their range has contracted. The biggest, most oil-rich fish used to concentrate off New England in the summer. But from 1993 until 2004, no significant schools of adult menhaden were observed north of Cape Cod. As awareness grew of menhaden’s importance to the dwindling stocks of Atlantic food and game fish, state after state banned the fishery from its waters. Today the only Atlantic states that still allow it are North Carolina and Virginia. Unable to fish in the waters of any other states and no longer able to find large oceanic schools in federal waters, which begin three miles out from the states’ coasts,
Omega Protein now gets close to 70 percent of its Atlantic catch from the Virginia waters of the Chesapeake Bay. The industry has been forced “into a box,” Omega spokesman Toby Gascon told the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) last July. “We have nowhere else to go.”
But the Chesapeake, the tremendous tidal estuary that once produced more seafood per acre than any body of water on earth, is an ecological disaster. Historically, it was once the world’s greatest source of oysters, menhaden’s partners in filtration. But by the 1990s, overfishing and pollution had reduced the bay’s oyster population to less than 1 percent of what it had been at the turn of the 20th century. An alarming study by environmental scientist James Hagy and others in the scientific journal Estuaries in 2004 demonstrated that from 1950 to 2001 nitrogen overloads from human activities were stimulating rampant overgrowths of phytoplankton, literally choking the bay, creating ever-expanding dead zones. Benjamin Cuker, professor of marine and environmental science at Virginia’s Hampton University, has discovered that these dead zones have continued to enlarge every year since 2001: “All the way from south of the Potomac to the Bay Bridge the water below eight meters is now severely hypoxic, uninhabitable by any organism that demands any significant amount of oxygen.”
All of which makes the conservation of menhaden even more urgent. “With the oyster population gone and little hope of its return, menhaden are absolutely critical to restoring the health of the bay,” says Bill Matuszeski, former executive director of the National Marine Fisheries Service and former director of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program. Bill Goldsborough, senior scientist of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, is alarmed by the huge catch of menhaden, “the main filter feeders that keep the bay’s food web in balance,” and sees these guardians of the bay becoming victims of a deadly “perfect circle”:
“Menhaden are big targets of Pfiesteria, the toxic algae known as ‘the cell from hell.’ The menhaden are ground up and fed to the big chicken farms on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Chicken manure from these chicken farms is the dominant source of the nitrogen entering the Chesapeake from the Eastern Shore. The nitrogen triggers the Pfiesteria, which then infects the menhaden.”
Thanks to Omega’s slaughter of approximately 233 million pounds of Chesapeake menhaden each year, the fish can no longer perform their other great ecological mission: being eaten by animals higher up the food chain. The most dramatic effect is on striped bass, the bay’s signature fish.
The Chesapeake is the world’s principal spawning region for striped bass, but half the stripers in the bay are now diseased with mycobacterial infections. Some scientists now think that the stripers are sick because they are malnourished, and malnourished because they are not getting enough menhaden to eat.
Thanks to the slaughter of 233 million pounds of Chesapeake menhaden each year, the fish can no longer perform their great ecological mission.
The person who first connected the loss of menhaden with the diseases of the stripers, or rockfish, as they are known around the bay, is Jim Price, a fifth-generation waterman who used to captain a rockfish charter boat. When Price encountered his first diseased rockfish in the fall of 1997, he recalls, “It was so sickening it really took something out of me.” When he opened the stomachs of others, “I couldn’t believe what I saw—nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing. Not only was there no food, but there was no fat. Everything was shrunk up and small.”
Omega’s Gascon, who did not respond to requests for comment for this story, insists that Chesapeake stripers are suffering from neither disease nor malnutrition. After he claimed last June, “I don’t know where they’re getting that info that they’re not healthy and suffer from a lack of forage,” I decided to see for myself.
LAST JULY, I went out for stripers with Price on his 29-foot Bertram. We sailed into the bay from the four-mile-wide mouth of eastern Maryland’s Choptank River, close to where Price and the previous four generations of his family have always lived.
Accompanying us were Joe Boone, an ex-paratrooper who had worked for 27 years as an estuarine biologist in the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and Jim Uphoff, then the stock assessment coordinator for the DNR’s fisheries service. Having caught or seen hundreds of healthy striped bass in New Jersey and New York, I was horrified by what I saw that night. Except for one, every striper we caught was covered with open red sores, often eating deep into the flesh. The only fish without sores was pathetically skinny.
The three men were unanimous in targeting the problem. “It’s plain evidence of how critical menhaden are to the health of the striped bass,” Boone said. “Menhaden are the keystone species.” “This is what happens when we use our menhaden as forage for chickens rather than forage for fish,” Uphoff said, adding, “There’s nothing in this bay that can take menhaden’s place.” Boone later told me that in writing about what I had witnessed, “you can’t overemphasize the importance of this fish to the ecology of the entire East Coast.”
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission imposes limits on the catch of almost every species of commercially valuable fish within three miles of the coast—except for menhaden. When the ASMFC began hearings last year on whether to place limits on the menhaden reduction industry, it was swamped with many thousands of messages urging it to restrain Omega’s strip mining of the Chesapeake.
Conservation and anglers organizations—including Coastal Conservation Association, Environmental Defense, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and National Coalition for Marine Conservation—banded together to form Menhaden Matter, dedicated to raising public awareness. Greenpeace led a flotilla of dozens of small vessels to Omega’s complex at Reedville, where young enviros and veteran fishermen united in a floating demonstration beside the company’s fleet while inhaling the stench from its factory. In a press release, Omega’s Gascon claimed all this ruckus was instigated by “fanatical big-game angler organizations…willing to go to any lengths of deception and defamation in their attempts to expand the sport-fishing industry at the expense of the centuries-old sustainable harvest of menhaden.”
For the first time ever, the ASMFC imposed a limit on the menhaden reduction industry, restricting its annual catch in the Chesapeake for the next five years to around 117,000 tons, its average catch for the last five years. Although some argue that this merely grants Omega a license to keep doing what it’s been doing, the company has indicated that it may try to have the limit revoked by the Virginia Legislature, which has long granted the industry’s wishes, and, if that fails, go to court or even move its Atlantic fleet to the Gulf of Mexico.
Such a move might exacerbate the ominous conditions in the Gulf. Scientists there are seeing the same problems studied in the Chesapeake—especially phytoplankton blooms from nitrogen overloads—on a much larger scale. Hypoxia and dead zones in the Gulf already encompass an estimated 8,000 square miles, an area as big as the entire Chesapeake and all its tributaries. The waters directly impacted by nitrogen from the Mississippi basin are precisely where Omega’s dozens of huge factory ships are concentrated.
What purpose does the menhaden reduction industry serve by slaughtering and commodifying menhaden? Omega’s financial reports disclose that fish oil is a substitute for vegetable fats and oils, and fish meal, the company’s main product, is a substitute for soybean meal, which even the industry journal National Fisherman acknowledges “serves the same purpose.” If Omega’s main product—chicken and pig feed—is just a stand-in for soy, why not shut down or at least downsize the fishery and plant more soybeans? That would benefit fish and farmers, create jobs, and reduce nitrogen runoff, since soybeans keep nitrogen fixed in the soil.
But Omega Protein doesn’t grow soybeans.
H. Bruce Franklin, John Cotter Professor of English and American studies at Rutgers University, has written and edited 18 books on American culture and history. His years of pondering the sea have included working as a deckhand on tugboats in New York harbor and serving as president of the Melville society.
cowherder
01-28-2010, 03:47 PM
Very good article cowherder and thanks for posting it. It seems that we are destined to kill off all living things in the name of the almighty dollar.
I don't know a lot about commercial fishing. I am reading the articles here and on the internet to try to understand it better. There is one recurring theme in most every article I read about these commercials though. They are greedy. Every time they have a lot of fish of one species, they come along and fish and fish until that fish is almost wiped out. Then they move on to the next species.
I also read the posts by the commercial fishermen on some of the other sites. They all say "Oh there are a lot of striped bass around, you should let us catch just a few, that won't make too much of a difference. Those guys are shady like that. Give them an inch, they take a mile.
I don't think guys like that can be trusted, Doublerunner. It's like giving the fox the keys to the henhouse, don't you think?:kooky:
Doublerunner
01-29-2010, 09:55 PM
I don't know a lot about commercial fishing. I am reading the articles here and on the internet to try to understand it better. There is one recurring theme in most every article I read about these commercials though. They are greedy. Every time they have a lot of fish of one species, they come along and fish and fish until that fish is almost wiped out. Then they move on to the next species.
I also read the posts by the commercial fishermen on some of the other sites. They all say "Oh there are a lot of striped bass around, you should let us catch just a few, that won't make too much of a difference. Those guys are shady like that. Give them an inch, they take a mile.
I don't think guys like that can be trusted, Doublerunner. It's like giving the fox the keys to the henhouse, don't you think?:kooky:
I have given this a lot of my thoughts. I want to be careful not to lump everyone all together. For any one to say that all commercial fishermen are the problem is not fair just like if someone said all rec fishermen kill every fish they catch. The problem really is $$$. Where $$$ is involved everything else takes a back seat. That also goes for the politicians and law makers who govern the fisheries.
Personally I think we're headed for a collapse. I don't see how it can be sustained. Plus I don't think much value is given to how the each sea creature needs each other as part of the ecosystem.
We all need to take less. Unfortunately that will very rarely happen unless the rules change. Human nature I guess.
Getting tired of banging my head against the wall on this issue:bonk:
surfwalker
01-30-2010, 12:53 PM
As previously posted in this thread, the demise of the bunker is through the greed and political way things are accomplished. That book not only brought out the rampant destruction of the bunker, but also how big business and some politicians work hand in hand. Just because your eyes see someone’s mouth moving, don’t take it for granted that it’s telling the truth.
Anyone interested in the Striped Bass should go into the history of said fish and learn about its habits. How some things that are altered by man affect the ongoing populations.
I enjoyed that book also. The numbers that were tossed around were incredible, the Menhaden didn’t stand a chance with the spotter planes.
Read it in your spare time and understand that some things can’t be left unchecked. Some things that don’t affect you directly will eventually affect you indirectly.
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