NCMC Conservation News

DECEMBER 7, 2011

WINNING REQUIRES
PLAYING THE WHOLE GAME

The secret of success is constancy to purpose. Benjamin Disraeli

Sixty fishing and environmental organizations and over 91,000 individuals contacted the ASMFC in support of strong new measures to protect Atlantic menhaden. (See lead story, page 1) Public input on this issue, according to the commission, was unprecedented, nearly four times the old record for most comments received.

If overwhelming public support was all it took to save menhaden, however, we would have won this battle long ago. We always believed that, given the opportunity to back real change, the many thousands of fishermen and wildlife enthusiasts up and down the coast who understand how important these little fish are would make their voices heard. But that opportunity, which came this year in the form of Addendum V to the Atlantic Menhaden Plan, was years in the making.

For over a decade, the NCMC was always there - at meetings of the Menhaden Management Board, Technical Committee, Advisory Panel and Stock Assessment Subcommittee, and dozens of ecosystem-based management meetings and workshops sponsored by NOAA, the Chesapeake Bay Program and others. We were tireless in informing, assisting and, yes, pushing the commission toward an ecosystems approach, making certain that menhaden’s importance as forage would be a topic at every single meeting where it was discussed.

THE SET-UP

When the ASMFC finally moved to adopt a new overfishing threshold that would trigger rebuilding, the commission neglected to suggest specific rebuilding targets to manage the fishery to. So we immediately went to work providing the Plan Development Team with information on a range of targets that would protect menhaden’s ecological role while still providing fishing opportunities.

Here’s where our previous work within ASMFC and with other institutions came into play. It was NCMC that initiated the recent changes to federal fisheries guidelines calling for forage fish to be maintained at a higher population size than other species, or more than 40% of the unfished level. We started the campaign to get the Marine Stewardship Council to consider ecological standards for certifying forage fish as “sustainable,” resulting in new MSC criteria, including a target reference point for forage species like menhaden of at least 40%.

We submitted reviews of scientific papers on setting targets safely above thresholds and rebutting industry claims that only the environment, not fishing, affects menhaden abundance. We brought forward authoritative science showing that, even if ecological considerations are ignored, a target of 30% is a standard measure for a sustainable fishery. In the end, an addendum that began in March with only a 15% threshold offered the public target options of 30% and 40%.

The rest, as they say, is history. To use a sports analogy, we played the game for the full nine innings, eventually moving a runner into scoring position. Then, in the bottom of the ninth, out came the heavy hitters – 91,000 of them - to drive it home.