You might know them as bunker or pogies. Landlubbers might not know them at all. Menhaden, a kind of herring that has been called the most important fish in the sea, are a keystone species in the Atlantic, serving both as a critical food source for predatory fish, marine mammals and birds, and as a consumer of vast quantities of algae that would otherwise clog waterways and shade out underwater vegetation.
Around the Chesapeake Bay, people know them as the victim of corporate greed and Virginia politics, both sadly familiar topics.
Menhaden have supported one of the East Coast’s largest fisheries since colonial times. They once supplied “reduction factories” up and down the coast, where every year hundreds of millions of the bony little fish were cooked and ground up to make lamp oil and fertilizer. Today, in addition to fertilizer, they are turned into cat food, health supplements and feed for farmed salmon.
As early as the 19th century, overfishing caused the population to decline, and it’s been a cycle of boom and bust ever since. One by one, all the Atlantic states but one banned reduction factories and fishing for the reduction industry in their state waters, protecting the bays and estuaries where the immature fish live for their first year or two before heading into the ocean.
The one outlier is Virginia. The last reduction factory on the East Coast is located in Reedville, Virginia, providing jobs for about 250 local workers. But this is hardly a sleepy little local business. The operation is owned by Omega Protein Corporation, which in turn is owned by a Canadian multinational, Cooke Inc. Omega’s fishing vessels use 1,500-foot-long purse seine nets to harvest hundreds of millions of pounds of menhaden every year. The fish are processed at the Reedville factory and then shipped out to Omega’s other business operations around the world.
In 2012, in the face of plummeting numbers of menhaden blamed on Omega’s operations, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) took on the regulation of menhaden fishing. Today the ASMFC allocates catch levels among the states, but in a way that locks in Omega’s outsized share of the fishery. Virginia’s — that is, Omega’s — quota is 75% of the total. The other 14 states in the compact share the last 25%, enough to supply bait for local crabbers, fishermen and lobstermen.
so where is congress and Mr harris in all of this? are you going to stand for the little guy or continue to let foreign corporations rape our childrens heritage?