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Research paper-Campbell

The Perfect Fish


In 1497, Giovanni Cabotto, better known as John Cabot, sailed to North America on a voyage of discovery at the behest of England’s King Henry VII. He landed on an island which he later called “New Found Land.” Cabot found the island quite desolate, but the offshore waters fairly teemed with fish. Because of Cabot’s glowing tales of the great quantity of fish and numbers of species off the northeast coast of the new world, European ship owners and investors would be ultimately rewarded with great wealth. (Mowat 182-183) Within a decade of Cabot’s voyage a seasonal fleet of fishing vessels plied the rich waters, and by 1517 there were reports of 150 European ships based in Newfoundland. These fishing vessels represented Breton, Norman, Basque, Spanish, Portuguese, and English interests. (Sedgewick 46) From Newfoundland, ships pushed west into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, south east and offshore to the Grand Banks, then south to the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, lying east of the land later to be named “New England” by Captain John Smith. During an exploratory voyage in 1614, Smith surveyed the coastline from the jutting peninsula, aptly named “Cape Cod” in 1602 by a previous British explorer, to the Penobscot Bay in Down East Maine. Smith was seeking gold and whales and found instead potential riches in the form of “an incredible abundance of most sorts of fish.” (Smith 9) Smith penned a book, soon after the voyage, describing his discoveries in detail. “Description of New England” was written largely to stimulate the colonization of “New England” and happened to be published at the time the Puritans, religious separatists, fled England to Holland and were searching for a new place to settle. Soon after hearing of Smith’s voyage, the Puritans petitioned King James to charter a fishing colony in the new land of Cape Cod. The Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, landed on Cape Cod and established Plymouth Plantation in 1620. At the time, they possessed neither the tackle nor the skills necessary to take advantage of the teeming resources of fish and shellfish that surrounded them. Ironically, half the colonists died the first winter mostly of causes related to malnutrition. (Bradford 39)
The local Wampanoag Indians persuaded Tisquantum, or “Squanto” as he was known to the whites, to be an emissary to the Pilgrims. Captain John Smith brought Squanto, an ex-captive Native American, back from England who, upon his return, found his people completely wiped out by European diseases. Squanto, for his first mission in March of 1621, started teaching the colonists how to fish and forage, and by Thanksgiving “every family had their portion of cod, striped bass and other fish.” (Bradford, Winslow 26) What Squanto taught the colonists next set the stage for one of the most profound effects ever to impact the ecology of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastal waters. When the colonists began to establish gardens on what Squanto described as “old grounds,” he informed them they would have to plant fish as fertilizer along with their seeds in order to realize a successful production of crops. By the 1630’s the use of fish as fertilizer was common practice in the colonies. Thomas Morton, in “New English Caanan,” made a comparison of fish-fertilized crop production to non-fertilized production. He described a standard of a thousand fish per acre and stated, “An acre thus dressed will produce so much corne as three acres without fish.” (25) The identity of this fertilizer fish remained somewhat ambiguous for years and was often generally called “herring,” “shad,” “allize,” or “alewife.” It was not until the 19th Century that Europeans finally realized the fish was the Atlantic Menhaden, a separate and distinct species, and a fish by far the most abundant of all fish along the Atlantic seaboard.
The Atlantic Menhaden, Brevoortia tyrannus, received its common name from the Narragansett Indians, an Algonquin tribe. They called the fish Munnauhatteaug or “he who enriches the land.” (Williams 114) This name was later anglicized and corrupted to become the menhaden of today. The Abenaki Indians of coastal Maine called the fish “Pauhagen” which also means “fertilizer.” Pauhagen was soon corrupted to “Poghaden” then shortened to “Pogy” which exists today as one of the most common names for the menhaden in New England and along the Gulf coast. (Goode 11-12) Interestingly, the Dutch, as early as the 17th Century, recognized the menhaden as being different from other American fish probably for their knowledge of a fish of the same ilk that frequented the waters of the Netherlands. The Dutch referred to their fish as “Marsbanker” and attatched this name to the Atlantic Menhaden. This name soon became “Mossbunker” and was often shortened to simply “Bunker.” (Franklin 20) Bunker is the name still used extensively in the New York and New Jersey area where the Dutch first settled.
Menhaden are members of the herring family (Culpeidae) but are not true herrings (Culpea). They closely resemble the Atlantic Herring (Culpea barengus), the American Shad (Alosa scipidissima), the Alewife (Alosa pseudobarrengus), the Blueback Herring (Alosa aestivalis), and the Gulf Menhaden (Bevoortia patronus). (McPhee 16) The adult menhaden is a foot in length, blunt headed, with silver, brassy sides and belly, and a deeply forked tail. A prominent round dark spot behind the gill plate and irregular rows of smaller spots are key identifying features. All of these species are planktivores, meaning they feed exclusively on plankton. Each species has a multitude of rakers on their gills that strain and trap the plankton they feed on. The menhaden, taken as an individual, is not a particularly impressive fish. As H. Bruce Franklin aptly states, “Nobody will ever write a Moby Dick about a menhaden.” (34) What is impressive, though, is a huge school of menhaden. The school operates as a single entity, often far surpassing the biomass of the largest whale, as it swims, darts, dashes, and turns suddenly, all in perfect unison. While this schooling behavior serves as a confusing defense from predators, it is what makes the menhaden so vulnerable to the purse seine of today’s fishery.
Menhaden have four distinct differences that set them apart from herring, shad, and alewives. These differences combine to interact in a very complex way and define the importance of the menhaden.
First, and most crucial, menhaden consume phytoplankton or algae and bits of suspended vegetable matter. Almost all other related species forage on zooplankton or tiny drifting animals. The ecological significance of this is immense and only recently fully understood.
Second, huge amounts of phytoplankton are produced in the western Atlantic and in the Gulf waters, and menhaden have very little competition for this food source. This lack of competition and their extremely high biotic potential, or ability to produce young, allows menhaden to dwarf the populations of any other American fish. (Franklin 24) Female menhaden contain so many eggs that they have to continually spawn as they swim throughout much of the year, as their bodies would not be able to hold all the ripening eggs at once (Franklin 44)
Third, because of their abundance and richness of flesh, menhaden suffice as the primary prey for many species of predatory fish, birds of prey, and marine mammals.
Last, humans do not choose to eat menhaden as they do other members of the herring family. Menhaden are very bony, their flesh oily, and their outsides slimy and smelly.
It is probably ironic that the menhaden is found to be distasteful by humans. One must remember it was the Native Americans who first defined menhaden as “fertilizer” and used them to enrich marginal soils. Because of their abundance, and as America became more industrialized and grew away from subsistence agriculture, the menhaden was exploited by agribusiness as a commercial fertilizer. This new economic value and the fact they were not tasty gave them no status as a food fish, and the wholesale slaughter of their populations began shortly after the end of the Civil War. (Franklin 25) This population decimation was further driven as other commercial uses were discovered for the menhaden and the result had disastrous ecological consequences and created a complicated economical and cultural history. It would be the menhaden which ultimately led to the first awareness of the interdependence of species and their environment in the late 19th Century.
By the mid 1800’s the United States was the undisputed leader of the whaling industry and owned 75 percent, or over 750 vessels, of the world’s whaling fleet. Whale oil was needed to fuel the world’s dramatic increase in industrialism, and was used for illumination, lubrication, and a multitude of manufactured products. Baleen, the brush like filters found in the mouths of planktivore whales, was considered the plastic of the day and was used as corset stays and buggy whips (Franklin 56) During this period, whaling was the first truly industrialized fishery; yet, in less than 30 years it was dwarfed by the menhaden industry. (Goode 54) While there were many factors that contributed to the decline of whaling and the rise of the menhaden fishery, the bottom line was simply the bottom line. Whale oil was being replaced by recently discovered petroleum products and natural gas as early as the 1850’s. Then an ever cheaper substitute source became available, one who’s biomass far exceeded that of whales, whose proximity guaranteed short trips and not the protracted, dangerous whaling voyages that took years, and one that could be fully utilized unlike the whale whose carcass was discarded after oil from the blubber was extracted in the on board “try works.” The substitute was the menhaden, often referred to once as “the little whale,” whose flesh could be pressed for oil and the leftovers ground and dried for fertilizer. (Goode 56-57)
New Bedford, Massachusetts was the undisputed queen city hub of the American whaling fleet but was unable to carry this over to the menhaden fishery. In 1867, a long visioned sea captain, Elija Reed, was making a thriving living in the menhaden industry in the Penobscot Bay area of Maine. He sensed his local waters were being over fished, and as he was familiar with the Chesapeake Bay, he loaded his menhaden reduction equipment on two schooners and sailed to Virginia. Here he set up his business in the sheltered harbor of Cockrells Creek in the upper reaches of the Chesapeake. (Frye 34) In less than 20 years, there were dozens of menhaden oil and guano factories located at this site which had come to be known as Reedville and had grown into a major United States fishing port. (Frye 34) The relationship between Reedville and the menhaden does not stop here.
“I believe, then, that the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say, that nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish. And any attempts to regulate these fisheries seems consequently, from the nature of the case, to be senseless.” This shortsighted statement was made by Thomas Henry Huxley at The Fisheries Exhibition in London, England in the year 1883. Some nine years earlier in “The Earth as Modified by Human Action,” George Perkins Marsh sounded the alarm of the possible extinction of certain marine species and used the great slaughter of menhaden as evidence of man’s destructiveness. (!06-107) Interestingly, Marsh’s citation was used even before the menhaden reduction industry was going full force. That very same year and with the echoes of George Marsh’s dire warnings that we were dangerously modifying our environment still ringing, The New York times was extolling the amazing wonders of American technology with reference to the traps, pounds, heart-nets, weirs, fykes, and purse seines that were catching fish at alarming rates. (Franklin 74) Even at 25 years prior to the turnover to the 20th century, the question “Where have all the fish gone?” was being asked. (Franklin73) Commercial food fishermen of the time sided with recreational anglers and waged a verbal war with the menhaden reduction industry and the wealthy riparian landowners who owned the fixed nets and traps. The fishermen who plied the rivers for the rapidly disappearing anadromous species such as herring, alewives, shad, and salmon joined in the fight against the industry and riparian land owners. Over fishing, it has to be noted, was not the only culprit in the blatant depletion of these species. The blame had to be shared with industrialism’s dams and careless pollution of waterways. But, it was the battle between the food and recreational fishery and the menhaden reduction fishery and riparian landowners that spawned a new public consciousness of the interdependence of species.
As early as the 1840’s, there were literally no Atlantic Salmon south of Maine. In 1849, Henry David Thoreau mourned the loss of the once abundant shad, alewives, and salmon from the Concord River, and wished to hope that “Perchance, after a few thousand years, if the fisheries be patient…nature will have leveled the dams and factories and the river will run clear again.” (40-41) H. Bruce Franklin, in his book on the menhaden, “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” responds to Thoreau’s sentiment, “Today, of course, the Atlantic Salmon of the United States are virtually extinct-except for those industrially produced with a diet consisting largely of cooked and ground menhaden.” (75)
It is interesting to note, if only to illustrate the attitudes and rationalisms of the day, that as the voracious menhaden industry was busy reducing populations and altering the entire marine ecosystem at the close of the Civil War, America was witnessing the destruction of two terrestrial species that were once deemed inexhaustible much as were the menhaden. These were the bison and the passenger pigeon. In the early 1800’s, more than thirty million bison roamed the country. At the close of the century less than a thousand survived. (Franklin 85) The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird on the planet. They were slaughtered for food and as agricultural pests throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Even as late as 1813, John James Audubon witnessed a flock continually passing for three days at the estimated rate of one billion birds per hour. But by 1890, the passenger pigeon was extinct as a viable species. The last wild bird was recorded in 1900, and the last member of the species, Martha, died at the Chicago Zoo in 1914 at the age of 25. (Bryant 36)
It is of further interest to note that neither the bison nor the passenger pigeon were subject to any significant nonhuman predation. Human intervention was mostly the cause of their demise. Menhaden, on the other hand, are subject to intense nonhuman predation by fish, birds, and marine mammals. It only stands to reason that to add another predator with a voracious and single minded financial appetite and armed with great technology would have a profound impact on the balance of menhaden populations and those fish, birds, and marine mammals that rely on them for sustenance.
After years of back and forth arguments on the plight of the menhaden, G. Brown Goode published his broad study, “History of the Menhaden,” in 1880 after he was commissioned by the United States Fish Commission, the ancestor of today’s National Marine Fisheries Service. Though not completely holistic, the study presented the premise that the role of the menhaden was simply to be eaten by many predators. The argument was a fairly simple one to make and support, but the public conscious raising needed to enact rules and regulations to “protect” the menhaden to be eaten by predators became an issue. This issue was a seemingly difficult concept for a society that was of the mind to eradicate predators in order to save their domestic animals from becoming prey. To deflect attention, the menhaden reduction industry waged war for a time on bluefish and sharks as they were considered apex predators. It took the potent and vocal alliance of the commercial food and recreational fishermen to educate the public that it was the menhaden’s role in life to be eaten, and by the same token, it was the predator’s role in life to eat menhaden. This role extended to other fish, birds, crabs, lobsters, and marine mammals.
The often heard argument that all population fluctuations were simply cyclical acts of nature began to fade. It was agreed, though, that populations were indeed cyclical but were so due to the acts of man. The distinct pattern was always the same, “abundance, over fishing, crash, regulation, partial resurgence in one region, and then a repetition of the same story in another region.” (Franklin 111)
It was a story of too little too late for the northern menhaden fishery just prior to World War II, and the fleet placed its emphasis on the southern waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the fecund Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake is the largest tidal estuary in the United States and once produced more seafood per acre than any other body of water on the planet. This was true even as recent as 1975. (Boyle 78-84) Besides the amazing array of species and species biomass found in the Bay, two marine species, both filter feeders, once combined to keep Chesapeake waters healthy and clear, allowing sunlight to reach and nourish the seabed. These are the oyster and the menhaden, and they worked in consort, each expert in their niches.
“There is nothing in the Chesapeake Bay that can take the menhaden’s place-menhaden are king,” states Jim Uphoff, the stock assessment coordinator for the Fisheries Service of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Menhaden are king, and as a forage fish and as a filter feeder they have no peers. Sara Gottlieb, marine biologist and author of a groundbreaking study on the menhaden’s filtering capability, compares the menhaden’s role with that of a human liver. “Just as your body needs its liver to filter out toxins, ecosystems also need those natural filters.” She goes on to say that over fishing menhaden is like removing ones liver. (3) A single adult menhaden is able to filter a minimum of four gallons of water a minute, 240 gallons per hour, 5,760 gallons per day. Gottlieb estimated that before their decimation the menhaden population of the Chesapeake had the ability to filter the entire volume of the bay and its tributaries in two days. (45)
Life giving sunlight on the seabed encourages growth of aquatic plants which in turn release dissolved oxygen into the water while harboring a host of fish and shellfish. Waters in estuaries like the Chesapeake are directly subject to excessive nitrogen loading from run off fed by drain systems, paved streets, suburban lawns, farm fields, over fertilized golf courses, and industrial poultry and pig farms. Nitrogen loading generates deadly blooms of algae like red and brown tides which cause massive fish kills, then sink in thick mats to the bottom where they smother plants and shellfish. The decaying processes in these mats of algae suck dissolved oxygen from the water and leave dead zones that expand year after year. The only remaining checks on the phytoplankton that cause these deadly blooms and dead zones are the menhaden. But the menhaden populations have crashed to less than thirteen percent of their populations four decades earlier. (Franklin 9) The Chesapeake oyster, though a prodigious filter feeder in its own right, exist merely as one percent of its population of a century ago. (Franklin 137) Aquatic plants flourish on only twelve percent of the bottom area of the bay. (Franklin 150) Presently, the Chesapeake is suffering severe hypoxia, or oxygen depletion, in 40 percent of the bay. And, since first discovered in 1968, parts of the bay are being affected by a condition of anoxia, the total lack of oxygen. Usually this condition is found only in older eutrophic lakes and ponds. (Wood)
The Chesapeake is an ailing body of water, its balance tilted toward a point of irrevocable disaster, its animal populations showing stress from disrupted food webs. As example, striped bass, having lost the menhaden as a primary food source, are very thin and have begun to decimate the population of blue claw crabs in the bay. (Franklin 151) Other stressors are toxic pollutants, deadly algal blooms, and the variety of diseases that attack all stressed species. All of this, even today, with the better understanding of ecology, pollution, and clean water. All of this in large part because of a powerful and influential business monopoly still deeply committed to the menhaden reduction industry, Omega Protein, a Houston based corporation with a port and factory complex at Reedville, Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay.
In the last half of the 19th century, competition in the menhaden reduction industry led to bigger, faster, and more expensive ships and gear. This and the increased costs of fuel and crews and the high finances needed to build, run, and maintain multiple factories put the industry, according to an 1884 New York Times article, “in the hands of the capitalists.” (Franklin 87) This is exactly what happened. As time passed stocks were depleted, operating costs rose, companies started to fall by the wayside, and the industry consolidated. Beginning with the crash of populations in Maine in 1879, the industry followed the fish south shedding bankrupt companies as they went. By 1964, only two companies out of a one time high of fifty were operating out of Reedville, Virginia. Earlier that year, one of the survivors, the Standard Products Company purchased the Brunswick Navigation Company and conducted business alongside of century old Haynie Products. Prior to this, history was in the making when in 1953, George H. W. Bush co-founded Zapata Corporation, a wildcatting oil and gas company out of Houston, Texas. Bush sold his interest in Zapata in 1966, and Zapata took over Haynie Products, renaming the company Zapata Haynie. Malcom Glazer, real estate mogul, took over control of Zapata Haynie in early 1990, sold off the oil and gas interests to purchase the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He then turned Zapata Haynie into a subsidiary shell and gave it a 21st century name, Omega Protein. In 1997, Glazer completed his monopolization of the menhaden reduction industry by taking over American Protein (the successor to Standard Protein), and a Gulf of Mexico company called Gulf Protein. (Franklin 126-129)
Omega’s fleet of 61 ships and 32 spotter planes annually capture billions of menhaden along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the total weight of which exceeds the tonnage of all other fish species combined. The menhaden are processed at five production facilities in Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. (Franklin 6) All the menhaden are reduced to oil, solids, and meal. The oil is used for cosmetics, linoleum, health food supplements, lubricants, margarine, soap, insecticides, and paints. The dried carcasses are ground up and shipped off to be used as feed for cats and dogs, farmed fish, and most of all, for poultry and pigs.
By 2001, all the states north of Virginia instituted bans in state waters on menhaden reduction industry fishing. Omega Protein now catches about 75 percent of its total landings from Virginia waters in the Chesapeake Bay. (Franklin 135) To make matters worse, only six percent of this catch of a quarter billion pounds a year are adult fish. Ninety four percent are juvenile fish, caught before they are of breeding age (breeding age is three years). (Franklin 135) Realizing the dangers of juvenile over fishing, Bill Matuszeski, the former director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, and then director of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program, stated in 2001, “We need to start managing menhaden for their role in the overall ecological system.” He strongly advocated the immediate closure of the Chesapeake menhaden fishery saying, “That would be inconvenient for the industry, but it would be inconvenient for the species to be extinct.” (Franklin 136) Omega’s company spokesman, Toby Gascon, responded by saying, “We have compromised all we can. We have nowhere else to go.” (Blankenship) Those who advocate closure of the Chesapeake fishery wonder what Gascon meant by “compromise.” In a 2001 interview with H. Bruce Franklin, Hal Watters, who was once a spotter pilot for Omega Protein, felt if Omega actually had nowhere else to go, then, “The fishery has over fished their own fishery and destroyed it themselves. And they are still at it.” (191) So, Omega Protein, sole participant in the menhaden reduction industry, seeks to catch what is left of the menhaden in the Chesapeake and in the process, destroy the bay as well.
The battle with Omega continues with Virginia and North Carolina still holding out on any legislative bans to menhaden fishing because of the vested interest of Omega Protein in those areas. The ironies of this complex issue are too many to list here but for one. All the products made or enhanced from menhaden oil or meal can either be synthesized or found in non-threatened resources. We do not need menhaden oil or menhaden meal, but we do need menhaden to be allowed to perform their two assigned tasks, to be eaten and to filter and clean our coastal waters. The menhaden has long been touted by the reduction industry as a “cheap” commodity, but this vision is skewed and omits all the dark realities. A “cheap” commodity, perhaps when we slide our money across the sales counter to purchase a menhaden enhanced product, but a very dear commodity when the “real costs” of a destroyed coastal ecosystem are tallied. The question arises, “Have we gone too far with the menhaden to come back?” The jury is still out and will be for some time, but there are signs. In the summer of 2006, adult menhaden showed up for the first time in years in some numbers in one of their old and favorite northern haunts, the Narragansett Bay of Rhode Island.




























Works Cited

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Pamela Wood, “Chesapeake Bay Gets a ‘D’ on Annual Health Report Card.” Capital, November, 2005.

“Chasing the Bony-Fish.” New York Times, May, 1882.