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Marine biologist Sara Gottlieb says: "Think of menhaden as the liver of a bay. Just as your body needs its liver to filter out toxins, ecosystems also need those natural filters." Overfishing of menhaden is "just like removing your liver," she says, and "you can't survive without a liver."

During the late 19th century, several dozen sailing vessels and a handful of steamships hunted menhaden in Gardiners Bay, near the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. The abundance of menhaden then appealed to another set of hunters: ospreys that nested in an immense rookery on Gardiners Island. As late as the mid-1940s, there were still 300 active osprey nests on the small island. But the ospreys fell victim to the DDT that was sprayed on the wetlands. Eventually, the number of active nests plummeted to 26. After DDT was banned, biologist Paul Spitzer observed a gradual resurgence of the osprey. However, in recent years he has watched the number of ospreys on Gardiners Island dwindle again. From 1995 to 2001, he says, "there has been an absolute steep decline from 71 active nests to 36."

Although no longer weakened by toxins, ospreys now have little to eat. "Migratory menhaden schools formerly arrived in May, in time to feed nestlings," Spitzer says. In recent years, menhaden have disappeared, and the survival rate of osprey chicks has fallen to one chick for every two nests, a rate comparable to the worst years of DDT use. "The collapse of the menhaden means the endgame for Gardiners Island ospreys," he says. Spitzer sees the same pattern of decline in other famous osprey colonies, including those at Plum Island, Massachusetts; Cape Henlopen, Delaware; Smith Point, New York; and Sandy Hook and Cape May in New Jersey.

The menhaden crash may also contribute to the decline of the loons that make an autumn migration stopover in the Chesapeake each year. Spitzer keeps statistical counts of flocks passing through a roughly 60-square-mile prime habitat on the Chesapeake's Choptank River, near where Jim Price found diseased striped bass. Between 1989 and 1999, Spitzer's loon count dropped steadily from 750 to 1,000 per three-hour observation period to 75 to 200. The typical flock fell from 100 to 500 birds to between 15 and 40. Menhaden are "the absolute keystone species for the health of the entire Atlantic ecosystem," says Spitzer.

Hall Watters, now 76 and retired, looks back ruefully on the role he and other spotter pilots played in the demise of the menhaden. "We are what destroyed the fishery, because the menhaden had no place to hide," he says. "If you took the airplanes away from the fleet, the fish would come back."

Watters was the first menhaden spotter pilot, hired in 1946 by Brunswick Navigation of Southport, North Carolina. He had been a fighter pilot during World War II and says he was "the only pilot around who knew what menhaden looked like." Brunswick had just converted three oceangoing minesweepers and two submarine chasers to menhaden fishing ships and was eager to extend the range and efficiency of its operations. Menhaden usually spawn far out at sea, and the larvae must be carried by currents to the inshore waterways where they mature. Guided by Watters, Brunswick's rugged vessels soon began to net schools as far out as 50 miles, some with so many egg-filled females, he says, that the nets "would be all slimy from the roe."

Watters remembers that in the early postwar years, menhaden filled the seas. In 1947, he spotted one school about 15 miles off Cape Hatteras so large that from an altitude of 10,000 feet, it looked like an island. Although 100 boats circled the school, many fish escaped. "Back then we only fished the big schools. We used to stop when the schools broke up into small pods." But things had changed dramatically by the time he quit in 1980: "We caught everything we saw. The companies wanted to catch everything but the wiggle."
Chickens are the main consumers of menhaden meal, followed by turkeys, pigs, domestic pets, and cattle.
The exact size of the Atlantic menhaden population in 2001 is impossible to measure, but industry statistics show a dramatic decline in catches over the years since 1946. The average annual tonnage from 1996 to 1999 was only 40 percent of the average annual tonnage caught between 1955 and 1961. Last year the catch was the second lowest in 60 years. Moreover, these numbers may not reflect the full scope of the decline because the catch is not necessarily proportional to the population. "The stock gets smaller but still tends to school," says Jim Uphoff of the Maryland Fisheries Service. "The fishery gets more efficient at finding the schools. Thus they take a larger fraction of the population as the stock is going down."

The large oceanic schools of menhaden are often too scarce to chase profitably, so the fishing industry has moved into estuaries and bays, particularly the Chesapeake. Maryland has banned purse seining in its portion of the Chesapeake. Virginia has not. Omega Protein, headquartered in Houston and the largest U.S. menhaden fishing firm, has almost unlimited access to state waters, including the mouth and southern half of the Chesapeake. By 1999, 60 percent of the entire Atlantic menhaden catch came from the Virginia waters of the Chesapeake.

These days Omega Protein enjoys a near monopoly fishing for menhaden. As the fish population declined and operational costs increased, many companies went bankrupt or were bought out by bigger, more industrialized corporations. Omega Protein's parent was Zapata, a Houston-based corporation cofounded by former president George Bush in 1953. Omega Protein went independent in 1998, after completing the consolidation of the menhaden industry by taking over its large Atlantic competitor, American Protein of Virginia, and its Gulf competitor, Gulf Protein of Louisiana.

Omega Protein mothballed 13 of its 53 ships last year and grounded 12 of its 45 spotter planes as the menhaden continued to disappear. Fewer than a dozen of the company's ships fish out of Virginia, but 30 ships fish the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf seems to be headed for the same problems that are obvious in the Chesapeake, but on a larger scale. Fed by chemical runoff, algal blooms have spread, causing ever-enlarging, oxygen-depleted dead zones. And jellyfish are proliferating, both a native species and a gigantic Pacific species. Researchers believe the swollen jellyfish population could have a devastating effect on Gulf fishing because they attack the eggs and larvae of many species. Monty Graham, senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, says overfishing, "including aggressive menhaden fishing," seems to have allowed the jellyfish— "an opportunistic planktivore"— to fill the ecological void. He says the proliferation of both species of jellyfish indicates "something gone wrong with the ecology."

Barney White, corporate vice president of Omega Protein and chairman of the National Fish Meal and Oil Association, the industry's trade association, categorically denies that menhaden are being overfished or that there is any ecological problem whatsoever caused by their decline. He says the controversy "is largely without basis" and is based on "lies" disseminated by recreational fishermen in general and Jim Price in particular. "It becomes an issue of politics rather than science— that people have a problem with commercial fishing in general," White says. "We have big boats closer to shore, so we're easy to see, and that makes us a convenient political target."

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."
Nearly 98 percent of the menhaden catch is converted into fish meal, proteins, and oils and then used as fertilizer and animal feed and in cosmetics.
Watters disagrees. More than a half century after he first took to the air as a spotter pilot, he fumes that "the industry destroyed their own fishery, and they're still at it." What galls him the most is that an increasing proportion of the catch consists of "zeros"— menhaden less than a year old. He advocates banning menhaden fishing close to shore, especially in estuaries, where the young menhaden mature. He also argues that if Omega Protein "enlarged the mesh size, they wouldn't be wiping out the zero class."

White acknowledges the industry is facing a problem of "recruitment"— — menhaden are not living through their first year. But he insists that the 13/4-inch mesh now used allows the very smallest juveniles to slip through. The real problem, he says, is "an overpopulation of striped bass. We think the striped bass are eating all the juveniles."

Omega Protein's financial reports indicate that the fortunes of the company rise and fall with "the supply and demand for competing products, particularly soybean meal for its fish meal products and vegetable oils and fats for its fish oil products." The fishing industry's journal, National Fisherman, says: "On the industrial side of the fishery, where menhaden is processed into feed for poultry and pigs, the demand for fish is depressed by a surplus of soy, which serves the same purpose." In other words, all the ground-up menhaden could be replaced by ground-up soybeans.

Since market forces are unlikely to curtail the menhaden fishery, governments may have to take action. Price thinks the fishing season for menhaden should be closed each December 1, "because after that is when the age zeros migrate down the coast." No matter what is done, most researchers agree the menhaden must be viewed not as a specific problem about a single species of disappearing fish but as a much larger ecological threat.

Bill Matuszeski, former executive director of the National Marine Fisheries Service and former director of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay program, says: "We need to start managing menhaden for their role in the overall ecological system. If this problem isn't taken care of, the EPA will have to get into the decision making." Matuszeski believes estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay should be put off limits to menhaden fishing immediately. "That would be inconvenient for the industry, but it would be inconvenient for the species to be extinct