[JohnR]

Oh yes, its the overpopulation of striped bass that is wiping out the bunker stocks, not the huge boats that harvest entire schools.
Are we really supposed to believe that? Are they assuming the public is that fuc#ing stupid?

It's not that the public is stupid but the public at large is uninformed. When you read an article on a topic you're not intimately familiar with in your Sunday paper, one tends to read in some common sense or what some of the "experts" say. But we look at this a little differently as we are more aware of the problem. I'd say the "Fishing Public" as a whole does not even realize the problem. (Would it be safe to say that between all of the fishing clubs, the internet, and the remaining knowledgeable & semi-knowledgeable anglers make up maybe less than 10% of the whole fishing scene?) Out of the balance of that “fishing public” and the public at large that have bothered to read about the bass and other game fish – these people still think that the Striped Bass was a wonder of proper fisheries management and that the stock is incredibly healthy. You get some yahoo like that making a statement, the majority of the public will probably believe it.

So it is up to us, in part, to help those addressing this issue because the Public at Large has no clue to what’s happening here.

And this filter feeding issue... I also had no idea and that seems to be a threat to all species. But its all lies anyway. There's no problem. Plenty of fish in the sea or so the saying goes.

The first time I had heard that was from Dan Pedro, he – with the support of several others and several clubs - was trying to get the Rhody legislature to pass a ban on seining in Narragansett Bay and a mile out from it. They heard the issue several times but kept conveniently coming to a split decision and table it for next year. Meanwhile the netter comes in and blows away the few N. Bay Menhaden in a couple days and moves on to the next stop along the coast.

From the article:

White attributes the absence of adult fish in New England and eastern Long Island waters to cyclic factors. "Well-meaning people who don't know marine biology have been mistaking short-term occurrences for long-term trends," he says. "In fact, the reports I have show that more fish seem to be moving into the area." Moreover, White says, "the total biomass is sufficient to sustain the industry."

That’s BS as well as those of us in “New England” are not seeing any increase in ADULT menhaden. We may have had more nuts in southern New England last year. Tey – maybe that’s it – last year was an up cycle in BABY menhaden. Looks like the big ships missed a school or two and we got lucky. We’re not seeing that strong concentration this year, are we?

What are stripers, blues, tuna, etc. gonna eat... are they gonna become vegetarians, or are they going to hang out in the harbor waiting for tourists to throw them bread.

Everything would collapse. The other forage fish like the macks, mullet, and herring do not have the biomass of the current menhaden – let alone what was available 30 years ago. They are negligible in the overall forage for these fish – and many more species that what I thought would be impacted before reading this article…

The one picture that frightens me is this one. It's pretty small on the website but in the magazine, it's a full page. The fish in the middle laying on it's stomach is a striper. In the full page photo, you can see some distinct stripes running along the sides. "Bycatch" I guess. I tried blowing up the photo but that just made things blurry. But trust me, it's a striper all right.

That’s another issue and fight altogether. That’s a very serious problem but perhaps not as grave as this one. The “bycatch” fight needs to be fough hard and won but it should not be confused with this one. They are both EXTREMELY important.

It’s easy for some of us in NE to forget about the bunker issue but it’s a bad thing to let happen. We don’t see them anywhere near what some in western CT, NY, and Jersey see. But they used to be found in Maine. Big, thick schools of ADULT menhaden way up the coast of Maine. And the guys I’ve run into telling me this said that it was only 25 years ago. The big schools of menhaden, for all practical purposes, vanished from Boston Harbor in the 80’s. Ask Got Stripers. When I was out on the boat with him a few weeks back, he told me of the good times he had when you could practically walk across the water they schooled on. GS – when was the last time you saw them?

In a nutshell – more needs to be done and we northern folk need to applaud AND assist our fellow anglers in Jersey/DelVarMar for the work they’ve been doing. I DO remember when I was a kid on the Chesapeke, seeing massive schools of fish going nuts all over the place. I didn’t know what they were at the time (hey, I was 10 when I moved the first time and had more important things on my mind when I was back at 14 – I think her name was Andrea). But now I do and you do too.

This is shaping up to be a very weird year in the fish. The late spring early summer fish in Boston Harbor were fat on Mackeral and Herring. The fish from ‘Ganestt and Boston have been pretty skinny as of late.

Bryan Taplin, an environmental scientist in the Atlantic Ecology Division of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has witnessed the destruction of all the large schools of menhaden by purse seiners in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. During the last two decades he has also studied changes in the diet of striped bass in the bay by analyzing the carbon isotope signature of their scales. What he has discovered is a steady shift away from fat-rich menhaden to invertebrates that provide considerably lower nutritional value. That has been accompanied by a loss of muscle and a decrease in the weight-to-length ratio of striped bass. The bass that remain in Narragansett Bay, says Taplin, are "long skinny stripers" that have been forced to shift their diet because "the menhaden population has crashed to an all-time low."

The thing that gets me the most?

These kibble of the sea fetch only about 10 cents a pound at the dock