Net Losses: The Bunker
History ©
By H. Bruce Franklin
In a 1997 episode of “The Simpsons,” evil tycoon C.
Montgomery Burns claims that, under the tutelage of that relentless
environmentalist, Lisa Simpson, he’s become a benefactor of society because
he sweeps hundreds of millions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and
turns them into “Li’l Lisa’s patented animal slurry”—“a high-protein feed
for farm animals, insulation for low-income housing, a powerful explosive,
and a top-notch engine coolant.” “Best of all,” he boasts, “it’s made from
one-hundred-percent recycled animals.”
Few viewers would have realized how closely the episode
mirrored reality. Mr. Burns’ real-life counterpart is Malcolm Glazer, a
billionaire tycoon who controls Omega Protein, a corporation that claims to
benefit society because every year it sweeps hundreds of millions of fish
from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into high-protein animal feed,
fertilizer, and oil used in linoleum, soap, lubricants, health-food
supplements, cookies, and lipstick. Omega has only one business, hauling in
just one kind of fish and converting it into these industrial commodities.
That fish is menhaden, and in 1997, just as Mr. Burns was proudly displaying
his loads of ground-up fish, Omega was consolidating its virtual monopoly on
what is known as the menhaden “reduction” fishery.
So what problem could there be with using the Mr. Burns
process on fish that few people have even heard of and nobody eats because
they are too oily and full of bones and smell awful? The problem is that
menhaden are the most important fish in North America.
This little fish has long been an integral part of our
natural—and national—history. Menhaden were vital to the colonization of
North America and the development of 19th-century American agriculture and
industry. For most of the 20th century, menhaden provided the largest catch
of any U.S. fishery, annually exceeding by both numbers and weight all other
fish combined. More important still, by providing food for bigger fish and
filtering the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, menhaden play an
essential dual role in marine ecology perhaps unparalleled anywhere on the
planet. And though menhaden have survived centuries of relentless natural
and human predation, the current industrial onslaught on them may be
unleashing an ecological catastrophe.
Blunt head, toothless mouth, pudgy body—a menhaden sure
doesn’t look like the superstar of coastal ecology. A mature adult only gets
to be about a foot long and weighs about a pound. Nobody will ever write a
Moby-Dick about the menhaden. Yet a school numbering in the tens of
thousands can weigh as much as the largest whale and behave like a single
organism. Watch an acre-wide school creating flashes of silver with flips of
forked tails and splashes, zigging and zagging, diving and surfacing,
pursued relentlessly by bluefish and striped bass from below and gulls,
terns, gannets, and ospreys from above—and one is not so sure there’s no
epic story here.
When Europeans first arrived on the east coast of
America, they encountered a living river of menhaden flowing with the
seasons north and south along the coast, extending out for miles, and
sometimes filling bays and estuaries from Florida to Maine with almost solid
flesh. In 1608, explorer John Smith found his two-ton boat Discoverie
laboring through a mass of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay “lying so thick with
their heads above the water, as for want of nets (our barge driving amongst
them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan.” To the Pilgrims,
menhaden were just another of the bountiful sea creatures God had
intelligently designed for them, as described by an awestruck Reverend
Francis Higginson in 1630: “The abundance of Sea-Fish are almost beyond
beleeving, and sure I should scarce have beleeved it except that I had seene
it with mine own Eyes.”
Because menhaden were essential to this natural bounty,
they were a powerful hidden force in the colonization of North America. As
Mark Kurlansky wrote in Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the
World, it was superabundant food fish that first drew Europeans—the
Vikings, then the Basques, and later the British—to North American waters.
Nineteenth-century scientists, partly drawing on the knowledge of
generations of fishermen, concluded that menhaden, members of the same
family as herring and shad, were essential to the diet of almost all
Atlantic predatory fish, including bluefish, cod, haddock, halibut,
mackerel, weakfish, striped bass, swordfish, king mackerel, and tuna, as
well as many marine birds and mammals, including porpoises and toothed
whales. As the great ichthyologist G. Brown Goode put it in his monumental
1880 volume A History of Menhaden, “It is not hard to surmise the
menhaden’s place in nature; swarming our waters in countless myriads,
swimming in closely-packed, unwieldy masses, helpless as flocks of sheep,
close to the surface and at the mercy of any enemy, destitute of means of
defense or offense, their mission is unmistakably to be eaten.” He wasn’t
far from the truth when he proclaimed that anyone enjoying a meal of
American Atlantic saltwater fish was eating “nothing but menhaden.”
But where did this enormous biomass of menhaden, so
crucial to the food chain above it, come from? Just as all those saltwater
fish are composed mainly of menhaden, all those billions of tons of menhaden
are composed almost entirely of billions of tons of the tiny particles of
vegetable matter known as phytoplankton. Eating is just as crucial an
ecological mission for menhaden as being eaten.
Eons before humans arrived in North America, menhaden
evolved along the low-lying Atlantic and Gulf coasts, where nutrients flood
into estuaries, bays, and wetlands, stimulating potentially overwhelming
growth of phytoplankton. Although menhaden are the major herbivorous fish of
these coasts, they don’t eat plants. They are filter feeders that live on
phytoplankton, much of it indigestible or toxic for most other aquatic
animals. Dense schools of menhaden, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of
thousands, pour through these waters, toothless mouths agape, slurping up
plankton and detritus like a colossal submarine vacuum cleaner as wide as a
city block and as deep as a train tunnel. Each adult fish can filter about
four gallons of water a minute. Purging suspended particles that cause
turbidity, this filter feeding clarifies the water, allowing sunlight to
penetrate and encourage the growth of aquatic plants that release dissolved
oxygen and harbor a host of fish and shellfish.
Much of the
phytoplankton consumed by menhaden consists of algae. Excess nitrogen can
make algae grow out of control, and that’s what happens when vast quantities
of nitrogen flood into our inshore waters from runoff fed by paved surfaces,
roofs, detergent-laden wastewater, over-fertilized golf courses and suburban
lawns, and industrial poultry and pig farms. This can generate devastating
blooms of algae, such as red tide and brown tide, which cause massive fish
kills, then sink in thick carpets to the bottom, where they smother plants
and shellfish, suck dissolved oxygen from the water, and leave dead zones
that expand year by year.
In the natural
ecosystem, menhaden cleaned the upper layers while another great filter
feeder, the oyster, cleaned the bottom. But as oysters have been driven to
near extinction in many Atlantic bays and estuaries by overfishing and
pollution, menhaden are left as the only remaining check on deadly
phytoplankton explosions. Marine biologist Sara Gottlieb, author of a
groundbreaking study on menhaden’s filtering capability, compares their
role with the human liver’s: “Just as your body needs its liver to
filter out toxins, ecosystems also need those natural filters.” Overfishing
menhaden, she says, “is just like removing your liver.”
The Narragansett called the fish munnawhatteaug,
“that which manures,” soon corrupted to “menhaden” by the English colonists.
The Abenaki of Maine called them pauhagen, their word for
“fertilizer,” hence “pogy,” still a common name for the fish. This is the
fish Squanto may have taught the Pilgrims to plant with their corn.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
menhaden became an industrial-scale fertilizer for the coastal farmland of
New England and the mid-Atlantic, with countless rotting fish spread out
over many acres to prepare the land for crops. Groups of farmers often
formed small companies—with jaunty names like “Coots,” “Fish Hawks,”
“Eagles,” “Pedoodles,” and “Water Witches”—that owned the boats, huge nets,
and draught horses necessary to catch and haul tens and even hundreds of
thousands of fish at a time.
With industrialism, the demand for lubricants and
liquid fuel soared, a demand at first satisfied mainly by whale oil. But
after the 1850s, with whales hunted to scarcity, menhaden became America’s
main source of industrial oil. By the late 1870s, the production of menhaden
oil was 40 percent greater than the production of whale oil. Four hundred
sail ships and steam ships hunted menhaden up and down the coast from Maine
to the Carolinas, chasing schools sometimes 40 miles long. A single haul of
a purse seine would often be filled with fish weighing as much as a blue
whale A hundred factories extracted the oil and sold the remaining “scrap”
or “guano” as fertilizer for nascent agribusiness. The menhaden reduction
industry had become a major component of the U.S. economy.
The reduction fishery reached its zenith during the
technological frenzy that possessed the nation in the wake of World War II.
The tools of war were directed at the little fish as leftover naval vessels
were converted into menhaden ships guided by spotter planes. Locating the
schools no longer depended upon a lookout in the crows-nest of a ship
wallowing amid the waves. A spotter plane, canvassing huge areas at high
speeds, could quickly spy schools that ships would not have detected. Hall
Watters, a former World War II fighter pilot who in 1946 became the first
menhaden spotter, recalled how, in 1947, flying at 10,000 feet about 15
miles off Cape Hatteras, he spied a school so big that it looked like an
island. In 1960, Watters spotted a school about “five city blocks in
diameter” and “dragging mud in 125 feet of water,” that is, solid from the
surface all the way down 125 feet to the seabed. Dozens of boats managed to
surround and annihilate the entire school. “I couldn't believe they could
destroy a school that size,” Watters recalled.
The Atlantic menhaden industry was booming. By 1949,
National Geographic and LIFE magazine were saluting it with
headlines ballyhooing “Uncle Sam’s Top Commercial Fish” and “Biggest Ocean
Harvest.” The catch soared year after year, reaching a peak of 1.6 billion
pounds in 1956. But not even the fish’s phenomenal fecundity could sustain
them under this industrial onslaught. Menhaden usually spawn far out at sea,
and spotters were finding schools as far out as 50 miles, some with so many
egg-filled females that the nets would come up slimy with roe. Then,
inevitably, the catch began to fall. By 1969, it had plummeted almost 80
percent. Looking back ruefully on the role he and other spotter pilots had
played in the demise of the species, Watters (who died in 2004 at age 79)
told me, “We are what destroyed the fishery, because the menhaden had no
place to hide.”
The collapse of the Atlantic menhaden industry allowed
one company to gain almost exclusive control of the endangered fishery. In
1953, during the heyday of the Atlantic menhaden industry, George H. W. Bush
co-founded Zapata Corporation, a wildcatting oil and gas exploration company
headquartered in Houston. After Bush sold his stake in Zapata in 1966, the
company began to branch out into fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, “wringing
oil from fish,” as one business journal snidely put it. In the early 1990s,
reclusive real-estate mogul Malcolm Glazer took control of Zapata, installed
his son Avram as president and CEO, sold off the company’s oil and gas
interests, purchased the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (forcing the city to impose a
sales tax, still in effect, to build a grandiose new stadium), and turned
Zapata into a mere shell for a subsidiary with a jazzy new name more fit for
a health-food company—Omega Protein.
The Glazers started snapping up the competition like so
many menhaden. Most of the Eastern seaboard companies, including some
founded in the nineteenth century, were going bankrupt or frantically
merging with each other. In 1997, Zapata took over the remaining Atlantic
and Gulf competitors, leaving only one small independent with just two
ships. In 1998, Zapata spun off Omega Protein as a separate corporation,
although it still owns 58 percent of the company, which is worth a mere $145
million and is its only remaining business. In May of that year, the Wall
Street Journal noted Zapata’s futile attempts to become a dot-com
powerhouse while sneering at the Glazer family’s “fish-oil empire.”
Although not exactly a household name in America
(except around Tampa), Glazer has managed to become arguably Britain’s most
hated man, reviled almost daily in the British press for buying a national
icon—the Manchester United soccer team—and turning it into his “corporate
toy.” To finance this coup, Glazer assumed a mountain of debt. Last
December, Zapata announced that it is trying to sell off Omega Protein,
possibly to help service this debt or perhaps to unload the business before
its troubles become too obvious.
Omega now owns 61 ships and 32 spotter planes. Only 10
of the ships and 7 of the planes—all based at the company’s factory complex
in Reedville, Virginia—still operate on the Atlantic coast. And there Omega
has big problems.
As Atlantic menhaden have declined, their range has
contracted. The biggest, most oil-rich fish used to concentrate off New
England in the summer. But from 1993 until 2004, no significant schools of
adult menhaden were observed north of Cape Cod. As awareness grew of
menhaden’s importance to the dwindling stocks of Atlantic food and game
fish, state after state banned the reduction fishery from its waters. Today
the only Atlantic states that still allow it are North Carolina and
Virginia. Unable to fish in the waters of any other states and no longer
able to find large oceanic schools in federal waters, which begin three
miles out from the states’ coasts, Omega Protein now gets close to 70
percent of its Atlantic catch from the Virginia waters of the Chesapeake
Bay. The reduction industry has been forced “into a box,” Omega spokesman
Toby Gascon told the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC)
last July. “We have nowhere else to go.”
But the Chesapeake,
the tremendous tidal estuary that once produced more seafood per acre than
any body of water on Earth, is an ecological disaster. Historically, it was
once the world’s greatest source of oysters, menhaden’s partners in
filtration. But by the 1990s, overfishing and pollution had reduced the
bay’s oyster population to less than one percent of what it had been in the
1890s. An alarming study published by environmental scientist James Hagy and
others in the scientific journal Estuary in 2004 demonstrated that
from 1950 to 2001 nitrogen overloads from human activities were stimulating
rampant overgrowths of phytoplankton, literally choking the bay, creating
ever-expanding dead zones. Benjamin Cuker, professor of marine and
environmental studies at Hampton University, has discovered that these dead
zones have continued to enlarge every year since 2000: “All the way from
south of the Potomac to the Bay Bridge the water below eight meters is now
anaerobic, uninhabitable by any organism that demands any significant amount
of oxygen.”
All of which makes
the conservation of menhaden even more urgent. “With the oyster population
gone and little hope of its return, menhaden are absolutely critical to
restoring the health of the bay,” says Bill Matuszeski, former executive
director of the National Marine Fisheries Service and former director of the
EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program. Bill Goldsborough, senior scientist of the
Chesapeake Bay Foundation, is alarmed by the huge catch of menhaden, “the
main filter feeders that keep the bay’s food web in balance,” and sees these
guardians of the bay becoming victims of a deadly “perfect circle”:
“Menhaden are big targets of Pfiestiera, the toxic phytoplankton known as
‘the cell from hell.’ The menhaden are ground up and fed to the big chicken
farms on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Chicken manure from these chicken farms
is the dominant source of the nitrogen entering the Chesapeake from the
Eastern Shore. The nitrogen triggers the Pfiestiera, which then infects the
menhaden.”
Thanks to Omega’s
slaughter of approximately 225 million pounds of Chesapeake menhaden each
year, the fish can no longer perform their other great ecological mission:
being eaten by animals higher up the food chain. The most dramatic effect is
on striped bass, the bay’s signature fish.
The Chesapeake is the
world’s principal spawning region for striped bass, but half the stripers in
the bay are now diseased, with either mycobacterial infections or lesions
associated with Pfiestiera. Scientists now agree that the stripers are sick
because they are malnourished and malnourished because they are not getting
enough menhaden to eat.
The man 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 Protein
spokesman Toby 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.
In July, I went out
for stripers with Price on his 29-foot Bertran. 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 worked for 27
years as an estuarine biologist in the Maryland Department of Natural
Resources (DNR) and Jim Uphoff, currently 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: the loss of menhaden. “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—except for menhaden. When the ASMFC began
hearings last year on whether to place limits on the menhaden reduction
industry, they were swamped with many thousands of messages urging them 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 ten-ship fleet while
inhaling the stench from its factory. In a press release, Omega’s Toby
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 two years to 110,400 metric
tons, its average catch for the last five years. Although many argue that
this merely grants Omega a license to keep doing what it’s been doing, Omega
has vowed to have the limit revoked by the Virginia legislature, which has
always rubber-stamped the industry’s bids, and, if that fails, to sue the
ASMFC or take the fleet to the more hospitable Gulf of Mexico.
Such a move might
exacerbate the ominous conditions in the Gulf. James Hagy, now working in
the Gulf Ecology Division of the EPA, sees the same problems he studied in
the Chesapeake—especially phytoplankton blooms from nitrogen overloads—on a
much larger scale. Hypoxia and dead zones in the Gulf already encompass
20,000 square kilometers, he estimates, an “area as big as the entire
Chesapeake and all its tributaries.” The waters directly impacted by
“nitrogen loading 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,
the author of eighteen books and hundreds of articles, is the John Cotton
Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in
Newark.
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf
