The most important species are not always the biggest, fastest, or most charismatic. The silvery Atlantic Menhaden usually averages only about 12 to 15 inches in length when it is full grown. But, it’s the massive size of a menhaden school which makes this the most valuable fish you’ve most likely never heard of. Menhaden are among the most important forage species along the Atlantic seaboard and a vital food source for dozens of other species.

For decades the menhaden harvest was among the highest catch in tons of any fishery in the nation, and gross overfishing was a strong concern among other fishermen who understand the menhaden’s valuable role as a forage fish. But this isn’t the first time that menhaden have been in the news or that efforts have been tried to establish a more sustainable fishing level. In a landmark move last year, East Coast fishery managers—responding to a plea for action by more than 90,000 people —committed to advancing new protections for Atlantic menhaden. Now is the time to make sure these plans become real improvements on the water.

Right now we need your help in sending the message that Menhaden need better management! Send a message before Nov. 16^th!

Menhaden populations have plummeted 90 percent over the past 25 years and remain at an all-time low—just 10 percent of historic levels. Because these small fish are prey for larger animals, this decline threatens to disrupt coastal and marine food webs and affect the thousands of fishing, whale-watching, and bird-watching businesses that menhaden help support.

We need to leave more menhaden in the ocean to promote their recovery. There is no limit on the total amount of these fish that can be caught at sea. Every year, hundreds of millions of them are ground up to make fertilizer; fish meal for farm animals, pets, and aquaculture; and oil for dietary supplements.

On Dec. 14, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will make decisions that are critical to the recovery of Atlantic menhaden and the ocean wildlife that depends on them for food. Let the commission know that it’s time to bring the menhaden fishery into the 21^st century.

Please take a few minutes to send a letter to the Atlantic States Fisheries Commission before Nov. 16^th!

Or you can do the right thing by writing a letter to Dr. Louis Daniel, vice chair, Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission via the ASMFC staff and urge them to:

• Set an enforceable catch limit;
• Reduce the overall amount caught each year; and,
• Follow-through on commitments to restore the menhaden population.

Thank You for your help – now pass it along to your friends!

Atlantic Menhaden are small but vital for a healthy ocean ecosystem

September 10 – New Study Shows Overfishing Costs Southeast and Gulf Regions Millions Per Year – By Lee Crockett of the Pew Environment Group. There’s an old saying that a penny saved is a penny earned. This sound financial advice is equally true for management of U.S. ocean fish resources. As I’ve said before, conserving our ocean fish populations is a prudent economic investment. The converse is also true: Overfishing is bad economic policy.

September 14 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, September 14 – This week in Fish Talk in the News: A disaster declaration for the New England groundfish fishery; fishermen oppose an increase in the minimum landing size for conch; an increase in seafood-borne illness in Maine; a new study of the importance of forage fish; NMFS denies a request to alter the gillnetting closure intended to protect porpoises; Shaw’s expands its sustainable seafood choices; a study suggests seal culling wouldn’t help fish; John Bullard continues his public listening sessions; and the US Court of Appeals upholds catch shares for West Coast groundfish.

This post was originally published on TalkingFish.org.

Despite its caption, the “Transparent and Science-Based Fishery Management Act of 2012,” H.R. 6350, introduced by U.S. Representative John Runyun of New Jersey just hours before Congress adjourned for summer recess on August 2^nd is a misguided piece of legislation.  It brings political interference and micro-management back into fisheries management, thwarts science-based decisions, costs jobs and any hope of increased prosperity for hundreds of fishing families, eliminates government and fisherman accountability for a public resource, and reverses the painful progress and sacrifice that has been made in recent years to restore many of America’s once-bountiful fisheries.

New England certainly doesn’t need this bill.  All it would do here is to pull fishing families and businesses back into the tar pit of mismanagement and economic and social decline from which they have been struggling to escape for the past two decades. Whatever Representative Runyan’s intentions might be, the only outcome this legislation guarantees is more chaos and productivity losses in this nation’s fisheries.

In 2006, important accountability provisions were introduced into the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and recent reviews of fisheries management indicate that they are working to rebuild fish stocks. Despite this success, Representative Runyun is trying to un-do these provisions. In 2006, 28 % of the nation’s fisheries for which data was available were overfished; in those fisheries with adequate data, 26% of them were subject to overfishing. By June 2012, just one or two years after the new Magnuson measures took effect, 23% remained in an overfished condition and overfishing was down to 17%. Not great after 35 years of federal management but headed the right way. Unfortunately, New England’s fish stocks–the poster child for what happens with “management flexibility”—remained among the worst in the nation.

New England managers have destroyed hundreds of good fishing businesses and plummeted cod populations to levels never seen in history by catering to short term economic interests at the expense of long term profitability.  In the New England groundfish fishery, overfishing and mismanagement have resulted in significant revenue losses. If stocks were at managed at sustainable levels, current groundfish revenues could be three times greater – infusing New England’s economy with nearly $170 million in additional dockside revenues compared to 2010 revenues. In New England, we’ve seen the human and ecological damage caused by ”flexible fishery management.” It doesn’t work. Not for the fish and not for the fishermen..

If Congressman Runyun cared about fisheries, he would lead the charge to secure adequate federal appropriations for better research, better stock assessments, more data, better assessment technology research and development, and innovative gear research by fishermen, not file backward laws. Unfortunately, he appears to be more interested in demagoguery and ideology than he is in solving real fisheries problems. From where I sit, his legislation is a political distraction to the real work that needs to be done —  restoring sustainable fisheries and communities in New England.

August 7 – Brooklyn’s Mermaid’s Garden tells us what it’s like to run a CSF – Bianca Piccillo and Mark Usewicz are the presidents of Mermaid’s Garden, a Brooklyn, NY based community supported fishery (CSF) and sustainable seafood consulting organization.

August 10 – More Congressional Fisheries Misdirection – Despite its caption, the “Transparent and Science-Based Fishery Management Act of 2012,” H.R. 6350, introduced by U.S. Representative John Runyun of New Jersey just hours before Congress adjourned for summer recess on August 2nd is a misguided piece of legislation.

August 10 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, August 10 - This week in Fish Talk in the News: U.S. district court demands stricter regulations for Atlantic river herring; a NOAA workshop on catch per unit effort and landings per unit effort; new low-interest loans for small-scale fishermen; congressional delegates express concern over menhaden stock assessments; sustainable seafood is also the healthiest seafood; sustainable Maine squid grow in popularity; the Out of the Blue program to promote underutilized local seafood wraps up; and the Maine lobster glut causes protests in Canada.

This piece was originally published on TalkingFish.org.

Federal fishery managers rolled the dice on the New England cod fishery on Monday, once again. It is hard to escape the premonition that they fell well short of their responsibility. We think catch levels were set too high, too little was done to reduce the growing cod catches of recreational fishermen, and nothing was done to balance fishermen’s economic and social pain by directing the small allocation of Gulf of Maine cod toward coastal fishing boats.

The decision of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to accept the New England Fishery Management Council’s quota recommendation had little to do with precautionary principles and much to do with politics.

Atlantic cod (photo credit: NOAA).

The 2011 Gulf of Maine cod assessment, which has a broad consensus in the science community, concluded that the fishing levels for the last three years had been set perhaps five times as high as they should have been. A large percentage, sometimes bordering on almost 90% of the spawning cod, has been caught each year in recent times. With few adults older than ten years old in a population that should include significant numbers of highly-reproductive twenty-something-year old fish, the spawning populations are buoyed by little more than the individual year-classes of new maturing fish, year-by-year. The risks of a Gulf of Maine cod train wreck may well be much higher than this decision assumes.

The one thing that is known with certainty about past cod assessments is that they have consistently overestimated the spawning biomass and underestimated the amount of human and natural mortality that is happening in the real world. The scientists are not counting all the fish that are actually being killed each year. In the fisheries modeling world, this sort of systematic model error is called a retrospective pattern. The new assessment, just like prior assessments, is still based on a model exhibiting a retrospective pattern.

What this means in simple language is that while the managers think their new catch levels pose a 30% risk of bringing spawning fish populations down to new historic lows, the real risk is almost guaranteed to be higher – and only time will tell how much higher.  The scientists’ best estimate is that Gulf of Maine cod spawning stock biomass (the amount of the stock that is capable of reproducing) is roughly 11,868 metric tons (mt). By setting new 2012 catch limits at 6,700mt, NMFS and the Council expect that 56% of this spawning population will be caught in the fishing year. But this 11,868mt estimate is just one in a range of estimates; the actual spawning stock biomass could be lower or higher. In fact, the approved 6,700mt catch level could remove anywhere from 41% and 71% of the entire spawning population with equal confidence. Killing two-thirds of the spawners in a population that is already decimated is not rational.

And it is critical to remember that these are just best scientific estimates. The unforeseen cod collapse in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s that has lasted many decades now produced one irrefutable fact: even the smartest people in the room can’t fully understand or predict, let alone control, the biology of a situation. We should be mindful of that if we are to avoid our own cod collapse.

On the brighter side of the NMFS interim cod action, the managers didn’t open up any of the areas that are currently closed to fishing in order to protect important fish habitat and help species rebuild. That would have done little to help Gulf of Maine cod fishermen and much to undermine other rebuilding stocks that likely benefit from these closed areas. Significantly more analysis is needed before that action should be considered.

We are also encouraged to see that additional cod assessments and analysis will be done later this year. There may also be new assessment tools—specifically, the new low frequency sonar technologies developed by MIT and Northeastern—that might finally allow scientists to “see” the fish under the water and get a better real-time estimate of what the total populations of cod might be. All this work is of the highest priority. It would be a great relief if the latest assessment turned out to be overly pessimistic.

The power of denial and the risk of significant bias in these efforts, however, cannot be overstated.  The new analysis must be done right. With so much political pressure, so many fishermen in serious economic straits already, and so many scientists heading into the effort hopeful that a new look at the cod populations might produce a better result, the tendency to skew the inquiry will be practically unavoidable. With the long-term health of Atlantic cod in New England in the balance, however, the integrity of the scientific process must be protected.

There is no way to completely reduce the risks in a fishery, no perfect fishery. Nonetheless, we had started to hope that the New England managers were getting more risk-averse and more focused on realizing the important goal of managing this pivotal fishery out of its persistent crisis state. We hoped that they were becoming more mindful of the bad distributional effects of some of their management rules on the smaller coastal day boats. This latest cod decision negates optimism. It treated that long-term better and fairer future like some game of chance with such long odds that it wasn’t even worth playing.

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  TalkingFish.org's Ask an Expert interview this week is with Chef Evan Mallett of Portsmouth's Black Trumpet Bistro (Photo credit: Black Trumpet Bistro).

  February 21: “Letter to Secretary Bryson: New England Can’t Afford To Put Gulf of Maine Cod at Risk” – Originally published right here on the CLF Scoop, CLF’s Peter Shelley blogged about his request to Commerce Secretary John Bryson to impose strict catch limits to protect the Gulf of Maine cod population and also to provide federal disaster relief funding to fishermen who will face economic hardship due to the lower catch allowances.

• February 23: “Chef Evan Mallett is committed to a diverse and sustainable menu” – Our latest Ask an Expert feature interviews Evan Mallett, chef and owner of Black Trumpet Bistro in Portsmouth, NH. Chef Evan talks about the importance of flexibility and diversity when creating his menus.
• February 24: “Fish Talk in the News – Friday, February 24” – This week’s stories: NOAA’s proposed 2013 budget may cut funding for fisheries but requests support for research in the northeast; gross revenues are up after the Pacific groundfish fleet’s first year under catch shares; the Nature Conservancy is working with diverse stakeholders to prevent river herring bycatch; and the World Bank is creating a global alliance to save the world’s oceans.

• “Bottom Line: Historic Anniversary for Fishing in America’s Oceans”: Lee Crockett of the Pew Environment Group discusses the 2007 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and the progress that has been made because of its strict limits on overfishing.
• “Fish Talk in the News – Friday, January 27″: This week’s news roundup: discussion of NOAA’s potential move from the Department of Commerce to the Department of the Interior, talking fishery management with Maine fisherman Glen Libby, and updates on menhaden conservation and the Gulf of Maine cod stock assessment.

As I wrote in a recent post here on CLF Scoop, I testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources on a topic that I have worked on for years: restoring New England’s fisheries and commercial fish populations. We recently posted that clip to YouTube. You can watch it by clicking on the image below.

You can also download a transcript of my testimony here, or read it here.

Thanks for supporting CLF’s work to rebuild a vibrant New England fishery.

Catch up with the latest news on Talking Fish, a blog brought to you by CLF and other organizations and individuals who want to see a sustainable fishing industry in New England and abundant fish populations for generations to come. Talking Fish aims to increase people’s understanding of the scientific, financial and social aspects at work in New England’s fisheries. Here’s what went on this week:

• August 16: “Consumer education is the key to better prices for New England fish” – Glen Libby, Maine fisherman, writes about educating consumers about the importance of buying fish that are caught locally and are sold at prices that allow fishermen to make a profit and continue to fish sustainably and responsibly.
• August 18: “Overfishing 101: Why rebuilding fish populations benefits everyone” – In the latest post in his “Overfishing 101″ series, Lee Crockett of the Pew Environment Group writes about how rebuilding fish populations provides long-term benefits for commercial fishermen, coastal communities, ecosystems, consumers, and recreational fishermen.
• August 18: “Fish Talk in the News – Thursday, August 18″ – A weekly update of recent news stories that might interest Talking Fish readers.