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By TISHA THOMPSON/myfoxdc -
Fish oil supplements. They're supposed to be a quick and easy way to improve your health. But a FOX 5 Investigation shows you how these little pills are causing a big controversy about the future of the Chesapeake Bay.
From pills to margarine to eggs, if it contains Omega-3 fatty acids, it probably comes from a small, silvery fish nobody likes to eat.
"I must say I've tried and it's not very good to eat," says Bill Goldsboro of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
Known as pogies or bunkers, Goldsboro says they're really called menhaden and nearly everything in the Chesapeake Bay, from fish to birds to whales, depends on these oily fish as a food source. Without them, Goldsboro says the Bay's ecosystem would collapse.
"In an ecological sense, it is the most important fish in the Bay," said Goldsboro.
Jim Price is partial to striped bass himself. But, as president of the Chesapeake Bay Ecological Foundation, he's spent the last decade counting menhaden inside the stomachs of striped bass. He says there are now so few menhaden left in the Bay, the striped bass are showing up with sores because they're starving to death.
"They're overfished in the sense there's not enough of them to support the needs of the birds and the fish in the Chesapeake," said Price.
With as many as a million fish swimming in the same school, menhaden are easy prey. And easy to spot from airplanes used by industrial fisherman to guide boats around the school, so they can close up a net like a purse string.
Called purse seine fishing, the fishermen then stick a vacuum into the net to suck up the entire school.
"It's bad enough in the ocean, but when you're doing it in the Chesapeake Bay, it's devastating," says Bruce Franklin, the author of "The Most Important Fish in the Sea," a book about menhaden. "We're at a very dangerous stage right now and the question is very, very simple. Will we stop before it's too late?"
Nearly every state on the East Coast, including Maryland, has tried to stop this type of fishing by outlawing it. Virginia is the only state left. Its also home to a $170 million company called Omega Protein, whose entire fortune rides on the backs of these little fish.
Monty Deihl is the general manager of Omega Protein's fish processing plant in Reedville, Virginia. He says, "Purse seine fishing is how we've got menhaden for 130 years here. It's proven to be one of the most efficient and one of the most effective methods of catching schools of fish."
A fourth-generation menhaden fisherman, Deihl says Omega Protein brings in 70 percent of all the menhaden caught in the United States.
"The menhaden has proven to be resilient, abundant," he says. "It's not being overfished."
A 2006 study commissioned by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate body supported by all of the states along the Atlantic coastline, agrees.
But critics of the study say instead of focusing on how many fish are left in the Bay, the study counted all of the menhaden, from Maine to Florida, as one.
"The whole industrial fishery is focused in the lower Chesapeake Bay and the water of the ocean just outside the Bay," Goldsboro says. "Most certainly, we have local overfishing circumstances but we just don't have the data to document it."
Hoping to remedy that problem, ASMFC commissioned a new study, due next year.
As part of the new study, Omega Protein voluntarily capped how many fish it would take from the Bay during the study.
But environmentalists say there are now so few fish in the Bay, the company can't even meet that cap anymore.
"No, that's not true," says Deihl. "We don't meet the cap in the Bay because we intentionally fish out in the ocean often during the year. The fish are more abundant and heavier in oil and we prefer those fish."
But environmentalists aren't buying it and believe more needs to be done before it's too late.
"This is the end of the line," says Franklin. "Eventually, the company will fish itself out of existence. But by that time, so much damage will have been done; I don't think they'll be able to fix it."
