Landings

The menhaden fishery is one of the United States' oldest and most valuable fisheries, with landings dating to the late 1800s. Data for the fishery are incomplete prior to World War II.  Landings generally increased through the 1960s and 1970s as effort increased, although there was considerable annual variation.  Peak landings occurred during the mid-1980s, when for six consecutive years (1982-1987) over 800,000 metric tons (mt) of gulf menhaden were landed.

Record landings occurred in 1984 when 985,000 metric tons were harvested.  Effort and landings generally declined during the 1990s, and fell to a 20-year low of 432,000 mt in 1992 due to Hurricane Andrew.  Consolidation within the menhaden industry (plant closures and fewer vessels) which led to lower effort and low product prices were major contributing factors to declining landings during the 1990s.  The most recent declines in landings are in part because of the active tropical season in 2004 and the two major hurricanes, Katrina and Rita in 2005, which severely damaged all four active plants and a number of vessels.  Additionally, in fall 2008, Hurricane Ike delivered significant damage to the two plants in western Louisiana.

As a rule, estimates of nominal fishing effort have only been used for forecasting annual catches for the gulf menhaden fisheries.  In a general predictive sense, the amount of nominal fishing effort expended is a good indicator of the amount of fish that may be removed from the stock in a given year.  Estimates of nominal fishing effort are not used in the menhaden stock assessments, that is, in VPAs or forward projection models, for reasons outlined below.

In a general sense for many fisheries, catch-per-unit-effort, CPUE, is used as an index of abundance, that is, a proportional change in CPUE is expected to represent the same proportional change in stock size.  However, for purse-seine fisheries it has been demonstrated the catch-per-unit-effort and nominal or observed fishing effort are poor measures of population abundance.  Thus, it is ill-advised to use fishery-dependent CPUEs as a measure of population abundance for the gulf menhaden fishery. 

Since 2000, four menhaden reduction factories have been active on the Gulf coast: one in Mississippi (Moss Point) and three in Louisiana (Empire, Abbeville, and Cameron).  Prior to the storms of 2005, total landings of menhaden ranged between 500,000 to 600,000 mt (Table) with less than 2% of the total used as bait.  In the Gulf, most of the catch occurs in coastal waters of Louisiana and Mississippi, with a lesser amounts coming from Texas and Alabama.  The average percentage of catch (where the fish are caught) by state from 2006-2009 is shown below.