Will there always be fish in the sea?

....not if there are no small fish for bigger fish to eat,
 not if one industry dominates a fishing culture,
not if politicians reject regulations and refuse to recognize the science that demonstrates the interconnectedness of life in the sea and the consequences of ignoring that interconnectedness.

In her article "A Fish Story: How an Angler and Two Government Bureaucrats May have Saved the Atlantic Ocean," Alison Fairbrother charts the decline of menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay and demonstrates how one tiny fish can have a tremendous impact on recreational fishing, industry, conservation, and politics. Her "fish story" also reminds us how one or two engaged and focused individuals can start a chain of events that could result in remedying careless and unprincipled predation.

Like so many of the creatures we take for granted, menhaden were abundant when European colonists first stepped ashore in the New World. Fairbrother writes that: "early pioneers described [menhaden] as swimming in schools twenty-five miles long or more, packing themselves into bays and estuaries where they came to feed on dense schools of phytoplankton...," and in 1608, John Smith described the menhaden in Chesapeake Bay as "'lying so thick with their heads above the water, as for want of nets we attempted to catch them with a frying pan.'"

I'm envious of those early descriptions of the teaming flora and fauna early explorers described: the millions of bison thundering across the Great Plains; the prairie grasses that grew as high as a horse's belly as far as the eye could see, undulating in the wind like a mighty ocean; the great number of whales that came so close to shore that early pioneers of Nantucket could kill all they needed without going out of sight of land. That abundance is gone forever. Instead, we have fish stories such as Alison Fairbrother's,  in which we learn that "80 percent of the menhaden netted from the Atlantic are the property of a single company" (my emphasis).

In this fish story, the corporation is Omega Protein. Go to the corporation's website, and you can read how the company cares a lot about sustainability, about how the Atlantic menhaden are not overfished, and about how the company is "certified sustainable by Friend of the Sea, an organization dedicated to the preservation of marine resources." You can also read how the company takes those small, unassuming fish and turns them into products for

• animal nutrition ("for the nutritional needs of all animal species"),
• human nutrition (The product here is OmegaPure, which is "a highly refined, long-chain omega-3 fish oil specifically formulated as a food ingredient." The fish are extensively processed to be used as supplements or additives in various foods: dairy products, baked goods, margarines and spreads, etc.)
• plant nutrition (fertilizer)
• industrial applications (rust inhibitors, water repellant, additive to paint)

Wow! Menhaden--the Fish that Lay the Golden Roe!

Only the story doesn't end there....and the story isn't all that golden.

Alison Fairbrother describes how the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), a part-time board of regulators, had been using a seriously flawed formula to determine safe fish stock levels.  She shows how interest groups have manipulated that "science" to achieve the outcomes they want. And she demonstrates the short-sightedness of a computer formula that doesn't take into account all the species that depend upon menhaden for sustainability. Instead,

[T]he agency is guided by an older and more utilitarian doctrine that is commonly characterized as “single-species management,” in which the primary concern is to determine how much of a particular species can be removed from the ocean without undermining that species’s ability to reproduce.

The ASMFC has a complicated formula and computer model that takes into account the amount of fish that Omega captains have caught and are required to record, the number of eggs that menhaden historically spawn, an estimated number of menhaden that are killed by fishermen and predators, an estimate of the current spawning potential of the fish, among other variables.

More importantly, however, ASMFC's computer model doesn't take into account all the other fish that depend upon this little fish to maintain their own healthy numbers--the striped bass, the blue fish, the weakfish, and other fish--and fishing birds, such as the osprey. (In Virginia, where osprey feed heavily on menhaden, "[s]urvival of osprey nestlings in Virginia had fallen to its lowest levels since DDT was first introduced to the area," and that decline has been connected to the osprey's diminished diet of menhaden.)

By 2009, science had revealed that "the number of menhaden swimming in the Atlantic had declined by 88 percent since 1983." Research also indicated that "menhaden had been subject to overfishing in thirty-two of the past fifty-four years."

Of course, economics and politics are entwined in this fish story. Although recreational fishing (all those sport fish depend upon menhaden for survival) has a much higher economic impact on Virginia and Maryland, the Omega Protein corporation donates large amounts of money to politicians in those Atlantic states ("almost $60,000 to the current governor [of Virginia], Bob McDonnell") and thus has some pretty powerful allies.

This great fish story reminds me--I don't know about you--about the importance of the smallest creature in the Great Chain of Being. The hierarchy isn't all that evident, though. We're all interconnected and interdependent in ways we have only begun to understand. Too bad our public policies too often fail to reflect that wisdom.

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Read the entire story here: "A Fish Story." There are other implications to this story, too, such as why menhaden are processed to create fish food for farm-raised salmon, an activity that's pretty much an ecological disaster.