Does menhaden fishing affect the recreational catch?
Anti-commercial fishing activists have been claiming for years that menhaden purse seining interferes with sportsfishing. The National Marine Fisheries Service making both recreational and commercial fishing statistics available via the world wide web, we decided to look at the data. We downloaded the annual commercial menhaden landings and the recreational bluefish, summer flounder, striped bass and weakfish landings for New Jersey, New York and Delaware for the years from 1986 to 1996. We selected the four recreational species because they are the most popular angling quarry in the inshore waters inhabited by menhaden. We used commercial menhaden landings and total recreational catch. Being interested in finding any relationships between the fisheries, for all five species we calculated each years catch as a percentage of the total catch for that species for the entire time period. In the graph above we plotted the average of the four gamefish percentages – solid line – against the m
