Atlantic Fisheries Update

If you’ve never heard of Atlantic menhaden, you’re not alone. The small, oily fish are not known for gracing the plates of dockside restaurants. You’re more likely to find them in a bait shop or in your fish oil pills, pet food, or lawn fertilizer.

Although not particularly appealing for human consumption, menhaden are a critical part of the coastal Atlantic food web, especially in their nursery waters of the Chesapeake Bay where they are a key prey species for striped bass, bluefish, osprey, and others. They also perform other ecological services, like consuming the algae and detritus that can worsen water quality.

For more than a hundred years, menhaden in the Chesapeake have been subjected to a commercial reduction fishery, meaning a fishery that “reduces” its catch to fishmeal or fish oil. But the Chesapeake is unique because Virginia is the only state on the Eastern Seaboard that has not banned the commercial harvest of menhaden for reduction purposes within its state waters.

The Virginia menhaden fishery is monopolized by Omega Protein, a reduction plant based in Reedville and owned by a Canadian parent company, and Ocean Harvesters, its fishing partner. Ocean Harvesters uses spotter planes and purse seine nets to efficiently scoop up schools of menhaden throughout the lower Chesapeake and just beyond the mouth of the bay.

In 2005, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission instituted the first harvest cap for menhaden and allocated percentages of the total quota among the coastal states. Because Virginia is the only state with a robust commercial fishery, the state receives nearly 80% of the coastwide catch quota. Most of the remaining Atlantic states receive a fraction of a percent to accommodate small, local operations that catch menhaden for bait shops. Despite some recent pushes by ASMFC to rein in Virginia’s menhaden fishery, including a harvest cap reduction from 87,000 metric tons to 51,000 per year in the late twenty-teens, ASMFC (as well as Omega Protein and Ocean Harvesters) maintains its position that menhaden in the Chesapeake – and elsewhere – are not overfished.

Many local anglers disagree. For years, Chesapeake anglers have complained that the commercial menhaden fishery has negatively impacted other species that depend on menhaden for food, including striped bass. The Southern Maryland Recreational Fishing Association even filed a lawsuit in 2023 against the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, which has the power to regulate the menhaden fishery more stringently than ASMFC, charging that the commission has failed to adequately manage the fishery under its mandate. At press time, that case has been cleared to move forward by the Richmond City Circuit Court.

Anglers’ main complaints have been that ASMFC has not adopted adequate research practices for determining the status of the menhaden fishery. Critics argue that ASMFC’s research only takes into account the menhaden themselves and not their role within the larger ecosystem or the effects of localized depletion when concluding that menhaden are not overfished.

In January, Virginia legislators filed a bill aiming to settle the debate once and for all. Calling for a three-year study conducted by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in collaboration with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, this bill, if passed, could determine whether Omega Protein and Ocean Harvesters are depleting menhaden in the Chesapeake as local anglers claim, or whether ASMFC is correct in its assessment that menhaden are not overfished. Lobbying efforts by Omega Protein convinced the Virginia legislature to table the bill until 2025. In the meantime, the fight between the commercial fishery and recreational anglers rages on. — K.B.

Pray for the prey

So what are Chesapeake and Mid-Atlantic anglers referring to when they say reduced menhaden stock is affecting gamefish? As politicians, commercial fishermen, and fisheries regulators debate the menhaden’s fate, the woes of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coasts’ most popular gamefish, the striped bass, continue to multiply. Stock assessments have rolled in one after the next showing dropping striped bass populations, a problem that has been blamed on everything from climate change to overfishing to water quality. But many people point the finger directly at a lack of the striped bass’s primary forage fish: menhaden.

The factor they often point to is localized depletion versus the overall menhaden population. In a contained waterway, such as Chesapeake Bay, is it possible to remove enough baitfish that locally the supply is diminished, even if the coastwide population is sufficient? While the question gets debated, it’s worth pointing out that in bays and estuaries up and down the coast where mass-scale menhaden harvest has long been banned, local striped bass populations remain strong.

Despite some strong local populations, starting in 2014 the coastwide stock assessment of female striped bass spawning stock biomass (SSB) began showing a drop below the target threshold of 188 million pounds, considered the point at which actions must be taken to reduce fishing mortality. By the 2022 stock assessment, SSB had fallen to 143 million pounds. Compounding the problematic nature of a falling SSB, the striped bass Young of Year (YOY) index, which indicates the success level of Chesapeake Bay spawn, dropped precipitously starting in 2019. Since then, the YOY index has remained well below half of the average, and the 2023 YOY index was among the worst on record. Chesapeake Bay is estimated to contribute between 50% and 80% of the entire stock of striped bass, so getting baby stripers into the pipeline is critical for the entire coastal fishery.

Fisheries regulators up and down the coast have been ratcheting striped bass fishing regulations tighter and tighter as stocks have fallen. Last spring the Striped Bass Board of the ASMFC took emergency action to impose a 31-inch cap as the maximum sized striped bass that could be harvested, and then later instituted a 19- to 24-inch slot limit with a one-fish-per-person bag limit in all Chesapeake Bay waters. Early this year the Maryland Department of Natural Resources passed an emergency regulation eliminating the remaining portion of the state’s Chesapeake Bay spring trophy striped bass season, which had already been reduced to two weeks. Additional conservation measures are being considered as we go to press.

Still, the lingering question on the mind of anglers from Maine to Maryland is, do the remaining striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay have enough to eat? — L.R.