Net Losses: Declaring War on the Menhaden
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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.
Image: Courtesy NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service
omega is seen as an agro-play at the stock market. Their stock was highlighted a few times by analysts/commentaries.
My final conclusion is not to buy their shares. Even with rising prices and profits near term.