Menhaden

COURT GARY ought to have a T-shirt that reads, "I went to Kilimanjaro and all I got was a crummy headache." That would be funny and partially true. But even though they fell a wee bit short of their goal, the Mount St. Joseph High School graduate and his father, Mike, got a lot more from their attempted climb of the 19,340-foot peak, the highest in Africa. Let us count the ways: The Howard County residents raised more than $5,000 to help build the Children's House at St. Casimir in Baltimore that will provide long-term lodging for patients getting bone marrow transplants at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and their families.

A commission representing 15 Eastern states voted yesterday to impose a limit on the fishing of menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay to prevent excessive harvesting and ecological harm. Menhaden, an oily fish about the size of a cigar, is a primary food for striped bass and other larger fish and one of the few remaining filter feeders that help clean the bay's waters. The 12-2 vote by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission means that the annual catch will be limited to about 105,000 metric tons of menhaden annually for five years beginning in 2006.

THE MINUTE they showed up at the Annapolis hearing on the proposed cap on commercial menhaden fishing, it was clear Greenpeace members would change the tenor of the debate. Goodbye, Andrea Bocelli. Hello, Luciano Pavarotti. No offense to the gentle folks who have been fighting the good fight for years, but Greenpeace knows how to wage a robust, bare-knuckles public war against a bully. On Wednesday, the regulatory board that oversees Atlantic Coast fish will vote on whether to limit the commercial menhaden industry in the Chesapeake Bay while scientists figure out why the menhaden population is crashing.

ON SEPT. 11, 1984, Maryland stunned the East Coast fishing community with a long-term ban on catching striped bass, or rockfish. "I knew that day we were going to win," says Dick Russell, author of Striper Wars (Island Press, 2005). Only months earlier, near-extinction seemed a more-likely fate for the Atlantic coast's premiere sport and commercial species. Maryland's Department of Natural Resources in late 1983 had caved to commercial netting interests, further weakening already inadequate protection for the rockfish.

Greenpeace has launched flotillas of seafaring activists to save whales in the Arctic Ocean and frustrate nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific. Today, the international environmental action group plans to send protesters in boats with a more humble goal: saving the Chesapeake Bay's population of a cigar-sized bait fish called menhaden. Organizers of the 34-year-old Amsterdam-based organization say they are set to send about 50 people with a giant floating fish skeleton and signs reading "Floating factory fishing is overkill" in 15 boats beside a Reedville, Va., menhaden processing plant.

EVER EATEN an Atlantic menhaden? You haven't missed much. Oily, small and bony, the fish isn't restaurant material. But to predator fish such as striped bass and bluefish, a school of menhaden is a movable four-star feast. That makes menhaden one of the most important species found in the Chesapeake Bay - in essence, the little fish that feed the big fish. That's just one of the reasons why Virginia shouldn't continue to allow an unlimited menhaden harvest. The numbers involved are staggering.

A former Department of Natural Resources official who was forced to relinquish his $25,000- a-year contract with the agency this month has now been stripped of his temporary position on a multistate fisheries panel. W. Pete Jensen, who retired as DNR's deputy associate secretary in April and was brought back on a contract basis days later, had been filling in over the spring for state Sen. Richard F. Colburn as one of three people representing Maryland on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

SO NEAR YET so far. The quasi-government body charged with protecting fish along the East Coast will vote next month on whether to take the first step in saving one of the Chesapeake Bay's most important residents. Or it may do nothing. "This represents the worst of public service because they will not take a stand on the hard questions," fumed Pete Abbott of Annapolis, one of the 200 or so recreational and commercial fishermen who packed a hearing last Wednesday night to urge the folks with power to do something.

A former Department of Natural Resources official who was working under contract with the agency was forced to resign yesterday amid revelations that he was also consulting for an industry group that is often at odds with the state. W. Pete Jensen, who retired as DNR's deputy associate secretary in April, was rehired days later under a $25,000-a-year consulting contract to work on a study to determine whether to introduce non-native oysters into the Chesapeake Bay. But questions were raised when Jensen turned up Wednesday at a meeting of the Menhaden Technical Committee in Manchester, N.H. Officials were talking with Omega Protein, a company that takes large quantities of the oily baitfish out of the bay. Maryland has lobbied to limit the menhaden harvest, in part to preserve the region's striped bass population.

THERE ARE TIMES when I don't feel like playing fair, usually because someone else isn't. This is one of those times. Wednesday, the regulatory body that manages many of the Atlantic fish will meet again to discuss how to protect menhaden, and perhaps by extension, the future of striped bass and the Chesapeake Bay. Everyone who remembers the five-year striped bass moratorium agrees something must be done to protect the small, oily fish that is not...