Officials who regulate the Atlantic menhaden industry continue to wrestle with how to balance the fishery business with growing concerns about the ecosystem.
After hours of back-and-forth and competing motions, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted Tuesday to reduce the coastwide catch limit by 20% for next year’s season.
The compromise was less than what environmental groups and recreational anglers wanted and more than the industry did. Virginia’s delegation voted against it.
Board members agreed to revisit the topic next fall, with the potential for further cuts for 2027 and 2028.
The commission helps manage fisheries for 15 states along the East Coast, from Florida to Maine. That includes setting the total allowable catch, or TAC, the maximum amount of menhaden that can be harvested along the coast.
Virginia is allocated about 75% of the total because it's the last East Coast state that permits menhaden reduction fishing.
Ocean Harvesters, which operates a fishing fleet to supply Omega Protein, collects menhaden by using large walls of netting called purse seines. Omega then processes, or “reduces,” them into fishmeal and fish oil at a plant in Reedville.
Other Atlantic states allow fishermen to catch menhaden only as bait.
Omega and Ocean Harvesters argue that any reductions to what they can catch would devastate the business, including the loss of longstanding jobs on Virginia’s rural Northern Neck.
Recreational anglers and environmental groups, on the other hand, believe the industry is contributing to declines in local species such as osprey and striped bass by removing the menhaden they rely on to eat.
ASMFC’s latest assessment of the fishery found the coastwide menhaden population is not being overfished, meaning the fish aren’t caught at a rate that would exceed their ability to reproduce.
But the commission projected that under the status quo, there likely won’t be enough menhaden to sustain the striped bass population. The new data show a 37% decline in menhaden since the last assessment in 2022.
That figure largely reflects updates in how the commission conducts its analysis.
In 2020, officials started incorporating “ecological reference points,” using complex ecosystem modeling to better capture not just the health of menhaden, but also its impacts on predator species, such as striped bass.
The new assessment factors in some of those changes, including updated science on how many menhaden die of natural causes.
The current coastwide catch limit is 233,550 metric tons, or about 514 million pounds, of menhaden.
Staff said that would have to be cut at least in half just to have a 50% chance of achieving targets to support the striped bass population.
Allison Colden, Maryland executive director with the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation and a legislative representative to the commission, was one of several at the meeting who advocated for doing so.
“Just as we were confident in increasing the total allowable catch when the science says we should, we need to be as willing to take reductions when the science indicates that that's warranted,” Colden said. “We recognize that that's a coin flip, but it's something that ensures we are properly managing the risk.”
Others expressed concerns about the economic impacts of a drastic cut.
“We're really struggling with profitability in that fishery and this is only going to exacerbate that,” said Megan Ware, with Maine’s Department of Marine Resources.
The board ultimately agreed to a modest 20% reduction, which brings the TAC back to what it was in 2022. In recent years, the industry has only caught about that amount regardless.
In a statement Wednesday, Ocean Harvesters stated the reduction was “unnecessary to avoid ecosystem overfishing” and will likely require some operational adjustments at the Reedville plant.
“Looking ahead, pushing harsher cuts in 2027 and beyond — particularly in the absence of new data — would impose needless harm on working families and a 150-year-old fishery,” the company wrote. “We respect the Board’s desire for caution, but the science indicates a 20% cut was not needed.”
Meanwhile, in the Chesapeake Bay…
This week’s vote does not affect the cap on the menhaden harvest in the Chesapeake Bay. But there is movement on that front as well.
The commission initiated an effort to draft options for altering the bay cap, such as distributing fishing more evenly throughout the season or reducing it altogether.
In the meantime, academics are also looking into the issue.
A few days before the Tuesday meeting, officials announced a research project focused on the bay harvest cap. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science is part of a new team that will develop a “research roadmap” to analyze gaps in science and better manage the fishery.
The project comes from the Science Center for Marine Fisheries, a collaboration that brings together industry and fishery scientists. It is part of the National Science Foundation’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers program.
The center’s projects are funded by industry members, a group of about a dozen seafood companies, including Omega Protein and Ocean Harvesters.
Anglers and environmentalists concerned about the menhaden industry have pushed officials in recent years to study what’s happening with menhaden in the bay.
VIMS drafted a report for the General Assembly in 2023 that outlined how to do such a study. Since then, state lawmakers have declined to fund the $3 million study.
Professor and longtime menhaden researcher Rob Latour said the new project is complementary. It doesn’t preclude lawmakers from doing the broader study, but it will dive deeper into the bay cap.
“We hope to provide a much greater level of detail of what types of research, what types of fieldwork, what types of labwork and costs would be associated with coming up with an approach that would lead to a scientifically-derived harvest cap for the Chesapeake Bay.”
The limit, first established in 2006, is currently set at 51,000 metric tons. Fishery managers have based the number on the industry's past performance.
The limit would ideally be based on scientific research on the population, Latour said. But there’s none to draw from.
“Just using average catch isn't really achieving optimal use of the resource from a sustainability perspective,” he said. “But on the other side of the coin, we have no data to really do this in a meaningful way, from a biological perspective. So you’ve got to pick something.”
The Menhaden Fisheries Coalition, whose members helped fund the project, said in a statement that it is “a long-overdue opportunity to replace political compromise with sound science.”
Scientists have a better understanding of other fish species in the bay. But menhaden are particularly difficult to study, said Genny Nesslage, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who is part of the new project.
They’re hard to catch with traditional survey gear and migrate out of the bay seasonally.
“We don't know the abundance of menhaden in the bay at any given time relative to the coast,” Nesslage said. “Then even if you know how much there is, we need to know a lot more information about the bay and how those harvest rates might impact menhaden themselves.”
The roadmap still won’t collect such data. But Nesslage said it’s important to have a plan in place should funding emerge.
