Old Lyme — Menhaden — small, silvery fish that travel in huge schools — are prized in Connecticut waters today mostly as bait for lobsters and food for popular game fish such as striped bass and bluefish. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, menhaden, also called bunker, were the basis for an important local industry. From Stonington to Niantic, five factories processed menhaden for oil, fertilizer and products used in leather tanning, according to William Peterson, a curator at Mystic Seaport. The industry moved south in the 1930s, he said, and today is a huge, mechanized operation that some believe may be threatening the entire menhaden population from New England to North Carolina.
In the Chesapeake Bay, these bony, oily fish are harvested by factory fishing operations that employ spotter planes, 1,500-foot purse seine nets and vacuums to suck them out of the sea by the thousands. They are rendered into a host of commercially valuable products including animal feed, fertilizer, fish oil nutritional supplement capsules, paints and cosmetics. Now the regulatory group for East Coast fisheries is considering whether to place limits on the Chesapeake Bay menhaden fishery run by the Houston company Omega Protein, or perhaps on all menhaden fishing in the Atlantic. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission conducted a hearing on its plan Thursday at the state Department of Environmental Protection's Marine Headquarters here. Drawing environmentalists and recreational fishermen and fishing business owners, it was the latest in a series of hearings in each of the 15 member states on the plan, which the commission will vote on in August.
Dave Simpson, supervising fisheries biologist for the DEP, explained the current menhaden catch in Connecticut waters of the Long Island Sound is relatively small, about 50,000 pounds per year, and is harvested mainly with small nets by lobster fishermen for bait. In 2000, he added, a state law banning purse seining in the sound was adopted out of concern that depletion of the menhaden stocks would harm populations of recreational game fish. Menhaden stocks here are currently considered to be at healthy levels. Speakers favored limits on the Chesapeake Bay fishery but disagreed about whether limits should extend throughout the Atlantic coast. State Rep. Richard Roy, D-Milford, co-chairman of the Environment Committee, presented a petition signed by 103 legislators calling for limits on the Chesapeake fishery. Specifically, they support one of the proposed options in the plan that would cap the annual menhaden harvest there at current levels while a study determines the cause of the declining population in the bay.
Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound are the main estuaries and fish nurseries along the coastal North Atlantic. “It's just got to be protected,” Roy said of the menhaden stocks.
John Hocevar, oceans specialist for the international environmental organization Greenpeace, called for stronger measures than the plan proposes. He noted that menhaden are filter feeders that clean the waters, and that their abundance or lack of it could be an important determinant of pollution and hypoxia levels. He also noted that in attending several of these hearings in other states, he has heard numerous stories from older fisherman that menhaden were once much more plentiful in their areas than they are now, suggesting that the depletion problem isn't confined to the Chesapeake. Steven Lewis, a recreational fisherman from Newington, concurred.
“I haven't seen a large school of adult menhaden since 1992,” he said. He said the commission must be careful not to adopt “an industry-driven management plan.” “We've got to make sure the whole ecosystem is going to survive,” he said. Michael Deskin, a charter fishing boat operator from Guilford, said the highly industrialized, methods of the modern menhaden fishery are to blame for the species' decline. Hocevar said the industry is pressuring for the reopening of waters elsewhere along the Atlantic Coast to purse seine fishing if caps are imposed in the Chesapeake. Omega Protein takes an estimated 80 percent of the entire East Coast menhaden harvest. Richard Weisberg, Connecticut's representative on the commission's Menhaden Advisory Panel, said a plan should be chosen with care that it doesn't cause the industrial fishery to move its operations farther out into the ocean to menhaden spawning areas, further depleting stocks. “We don't want to have a program that generates problems for other coastal areas to benefit the Chesapeake Bay,” he said. “We in Connecticut could suffer as a consequence.” In a letter to the commission, Audubon Connecticut urged a coastwide cap on menhaden harvests. The commission will continue to receive comment on the plan through Aug. 1. For information, visit www.asmfc.org.
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