ATLANTIC MENHADEN: DEAD IS DEAD, AND ALLOCATION IS NOT CONSERVATION

 

One of the biggest disappointments at the Annual Meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission last October was the Atlantic Menhaden Management Board’s failure to adopt meaningful reductions in menhaden landings.

The 2025 stock assessment update had found an error in the estimate of natural mortality, and determined that the natural mortality rate was lower than previously believed.  As a result, the estimate of stock fecundity (the overall number of eggs produced, which is used in lieu of a spawning stock biomass estimate) dropped substantially, while the estimated fishing mortality rate increased.  Thus, while the stock status remains

“not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.”

the assessment update noted a marked change in the perceived condition of the stock.  Previous to the update, it was believed that fecundity was above the fecundity target, and that the fishing mortality rate was below the fishing mortality target, which suggested that the stock was in something close to perfect health.  But the stock assessment update informed managers that, in fact,

“The fishing mortality rate for the terminal year of 2023 is below the [ecological reference point] threshold and above the ERP target…and the fecundity for the terminal year of 2023 is above the ERP threshold and but [sic] below the ERP target.” 

Thus, while the stock is neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing, it is also at suboptimal abundance and being fished at a somewhat excessive rate.  Somewhat ominously, fecundity was low enough—just 105% of the fecundity threshold—at the end of 2023 that it is entirely possible, depending on the number of new fish recruited into the stock, that a new stock assessment might find that Atlantic menhaden are overfished today.

Last October, the Management Board had a chance to remedy that situation, as they sat down to debate the total allowable catch for the years 2026-2028.  The existing TAC, for the years 2023-2025, was 233,550 metric tons; in order to have a bare 50% probability of keeping the fishing mortality rate at or below the target level, the total allowable catch would have to be reduced to no more than 108,500 metric tons, a reduction of nearly 54%.

The menhaden fishing industry, and particularly the “reduction fishery,” which purse seines menhaden by the ton and “reduces” the fish to fish oil and fish meal, was naturally opposed to such a large reduction, particularly if it was made in a single year.  Some New England states were also opposed to reductions, not because they had lucrative menhaden fisheries, but because their lobstermen needed the menhaden for trap bait, since the traditional bait, Atlantic herring, became overfished and are far less available than they once were.

So instead of taking any sort of meaningful action, the Management Board engaged in a sort of sleight of hand that made it appear that they were doing something, when in fact they did nothing at all to lower menhaden landings (although they did keep landings from increasing):  They lowered the total allowable catch for 2026 by 20%, to 186,840 metric tons.  However, the menhaden fishery wasn’t catching its entire quota, but instead were falling short by…about 20%, so the reduction in TAC, while looking substantive on paper, did nothing to cut menhaden landings in the real world. As Robert LaFrance, proxy for Connecticut’s Governor’s Appointee, commented,

“I think we have to recognize that when we set the TAC at 233,000 metric tons…[w]e did not know what we know now about the natural mortality of the species.  The fact that we’re looking at a 20% reduction from that number seems to me to be, it’s almost like a false compromise…”

Despite the near-meaningless impact of the motion, it passed on a vote of 16 to 2.

The only good thing was that, instead of setting the total allowable catch for 2026 through 2028, as originally intended, the Management Board only set the TAC for a single year, 2026, and will revisit future years when they meet again.

That has created a situation ripe for clashes between the menhaden industry and those trying to rein in menhaden harvest.

As I’ve noted before, menhaden are a “political fish” where emotional arguments have taken over the management debate, and largely drowned out the rational voice of science.  Menhaden have often been in the news this year, as advocates for reduced landings and advocates for the menhaden industry throw accusations back and forth.   Lyrics from that old Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth, are probably applicable:”

“What a field day for the heat

A thousand people in the street

Singing songs and a-carrying signs

Mostly say, ‘Hooray for our side.’”

As the August and October Management Board meetings draw closer, the volume of the rhetoric has been going up.

That’s not necessarily bad, as anecdotal reports indicate a lack of menhaden along much of the East Coast, something that is somewhat predictable when the fishing mortality rate is well above target and biomass—or in menhaden’s case, fecundity—is dangerously close to dropping below the threshold.

But what we’re seeing, particularly from the folks who purport to support menhaden conservation, are videos and press releases intended to evoke emotion rather than rational thought and, from some with an economic axe to grind, self-serving proposals with public relations appeal, which are not, at their heart, really conservation-oriented proposals at all.

For when we talk about conservation, we need to keep two basic precepts in mind:

1)      If you want to have more fish, you need to kill fewer of them, and

2)     It doesn’t matter to the fish who kills it; either way, it’s still dead.

Many of the people involved in the menhaden debate seem to be missing those points, and thus make it more difficult to adopt management measures that everyone—most particularly the menhaden—can live with.

I was reminded of that the other day when I happened across a video released by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, titled “A Tiny Atlantic Fish—A Major Controversy.”  The interesting thing about the video is that it hardly mentioned conservation at all—something that seems somewhat startling in a video released by an outfit calling itself the “Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.”

Instead, after a few cameo appearances from anglers and fishing guides who merely provided their views on how important menhaden were to coastal ecosystems and to fishing success, the only mention of conservation occurred when Jaclyn Lunaas, a Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership Employee responsible for the organization’s forage fish program, noted that the ASMFC was responsible for menhaden management, and that

“In order to have ecological and economic resilience across the entire East Coast, we need fair allocation of this public resource between states…Right now, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is going to be debating two decisions:  First, whether or not to reduce the total amount of menhaden that can be caught coastwide, and second, how to reallocate how that catch is divided between Atlantic states.”

There was almost no further messaging on the need to reduce the total allowable catch, and no mention of the need to get fishing mortality down to the target level.  Instead, the majority of the video was all about allocation, with Ms. Lunaas continuing,

“We just want a fair share of a public resource.  This resource keeps ecosystems healthy, boats running, businesses open, and communities out on the water.  We need a reallocation of menhaden quota in order to stabilize bait supply, particularly in northern states.  This would lower costs for lobstermen and charter captains, and it would keep economic value in coastal communities, while a modest reduction in overall catch would ensure that the resource remains healthy for everyone coastwide and long-term.”

That’s a somewhat strange position for any group that holds itself out as a conservation organization to take.  After all, if the concern is reducing menhaden landings—as it should be—it makes no difference whether those landings take place in Virginia, which is currently allocated 75% of the landings, or in Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida, which are each allocated roughly 0.25%. 

Wherever a menhaden is landed, it is killed, and will make no further contribution to the growth or fecundity of the stock.

And a broad ireallocation doesn’t even make much sense from a practical standpoint.  If we look at the ASMFC’s review of the 2024 menhaden fishery—the last such annual review available—we find that one state, Massachusetts, exceeded its base menhaden quota by about 20% (although it made up the overage by receiving quota transfers from other states), and Maine came close to harvesting its quota, but the other states’ landings fell far short.  At best, a couple states harvested less than half of their quotas, New York landed about 25%, but the other states landed far less—anywhere from about 3% in Connecticut to 19% in North Carolina.

So, in the case of most states, it’s hard to understand how reallocation is going to do more to keep “ecosystems healthy, boats running, shops open, and communities out on the water,” when those states aren’t coming close to landing the allocations that they already have.

Of course, if the annual catch limit was cut significantly, more states would come close to landing their full quotas, but even a 50% reduction would only have a material impact on three states—Maine, Massachusetts, and Virginia—with the other states’ landings, based on landings in 2024, still falling at or below their quotas.  And TRCP has already demonstrated that it couldn’t care less whether Virginia takes a cut.

So what would seem to make sense, from a strategic and a conservation standpoint, would be to reallocate some of Virginia’s menhaden to the northern New England states that need lobster bait, in exchange for their support of an annual catch limit—which might have to be phased in over two or three years—that would have a reasonable chance of reducing fishing mortality to the target level.

But a general reallocation to other states, which are already falling far short of filling their quotas, makes no sense at all.

Still, when it comes to the Theordore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership video, parhaps the most startling thing is that it calls for nothing more than a “modest reduction” in menhaden landings.  Since it’s hard to imagine anyone calling a near-50% reduction “modest,” it would seem that the TRCP isn’t all that concerned with real conservation—that is, getting landings down to the point where they’d have a 50% probability of keeping fishing mortality at or below target—and far more concerned with a largely unnecessary allocation.

Again, that seems to be a somewhat surprising stance for a supposed conservation organization to take.

But then, when we look a little deeper into the video, things become a little more clear; the reallocation effort is less an attempt to conserve menhaden, as it is a way to cripple the menhaden reduction fishery, long a boogeyman for many of the menhaden advocates, which is based in Virginia and would take a significant economic hit if Virginia’s state quota was cut. 

The buzzwords are all there.

The narrator talks about the Virginia quota being

“caught by a single industrial company,”

while the video streams pictures of reduction boats setting their seines, and multiple vessels returning to port, as if the menhaden would be somehow less dead if they were caught by anyone else.

The narrator goes on to say,

“So even though it’s a coastwide fishery, most of the pressure is happening in one place, and that’s largely coming from a single industrial organization.  Whether you’re a recreational angler, a fishing guide, charter captain, or tackle shop owner, it’s one industrial company that’s taking a significant portion of the most important fish that’s the key and the backbone to our fishery and all the small businesses that rely on it.”

The narrator can’t seem to say “industrial” too many times; he knows that it evokes a knee-jerk reaction.

But the question is why a purported conservation organization would take such a position, given that reallocation would have no impact on menhaden populations.

Part of the reason might be that reallocation would make it easier to convince Maine and Massachusetts to vote for a landings reduction, but the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership had already stated that it supported a “modest” reduction, so scraping up votes probably wasn’t a major motivation.

A more likely answer can probably be found in another TRCP press release, which announced that

“$1.5 Billion in Annual Economic Output Generated from Recreational Angling That Involves Atlantic Menhaden as Bait,”

and begins

“As the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission prepares to set a new menhaden catch limit and considers whether to initiate a reallocation process among the states, a new study shows that recreational anglers rely on this keystone species as one of the most important baitfish.”

Once again, it’s hard to understand why the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership would be making conservation policy decisions based on economic considerations in the recreational fishery, until one realizes that the “new study” mentioned in the press release was not commissioned by the TRCP, but by the American Sportfishing Association, the big fishing tackle trade organization, which is very concerned with maintaining the recreational fishing industry’s income stream, and which might logically be concerned about landings reductions making menhaden less available, and about local shortages of menhaden leading to anglers fishing less and the tackle industry selling less stuff.

And the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership tends to march hand-in-hand with the American Sportfishing Association on fisheries issues, with the TRCP consistently echoing the ASA’s economic concerns (e.g., the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s October 2025 opposition to a reduction in striped bass landings, in part because of potential “unwarranted economic disruption,” in a letter that seems to pirate its themes from the comments submitted by the ASA).

The economic study took the broadest possible measure of economic impact, economic output, which an economist quoted in the press release described as

“the full spectrum of spending that occurs for fishing trips where menhaden are used as bait, from direct purchases of equipment, food, fuel, and the many other items needed for a day of fishing, to the downstream effects that spending has on retailers, manufacturers, and countless other businesses,”

while the study itself advised that

“This report does not suggest that these fishing trips and the associated spending would not occur without the availability of menhaden; some of the anglers who currently fish in saltwater using menhaden might instead use different saltwater baits, target different saltwater fish or decide to go freshwater fishing.”

So, while I wouldn’t be shocked to hear some of the less responsible members of the advocacy community start putting out press releases screaming something like, “Coastal communities to lose $1.5 billion from menhaden crash!” which would be pretty much in line with the sort of thing that they’ve been putting out already, the truth is, as usually the case, less extreme.

Menhaden are an important forage fish.  Menhaden are important to anglers, in part because they make fishing easy—menhaden schools typically concentrate predators, and tossing a live menhaden into the schools is often an easy way to entice a bite—and in part because they are a popular bait and chum.  And tackle shops sell quite a bit of menhaden and menhaden-derived products. 

But—and pay close attention to this one—even with landings cut in half and no reallocations of any kind—the bait fishery in all but a couple of New England states would be largely unaffected, and still able to supply anglers’ needs, because those states are not coming close to catching its quota today.

And to those who might want to argue that some states aren’t catching their menhaden quota because the fish aren’t present in their waters, I will make the obvious reply that reallocating fish that aren’t there isn’t going to increase local landings. 

However, making more than “modest” cuts to coastwide landings very likely will restore menhaden abundance.

I hate to use an already overused cliché, but reallocating menhaden among the states is much like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Neither action addresses the core problem.

If you wanted the Titanic to keep floating, you would have needed to reduce the amount of water inside the hull, and put it back in the ocean.

And if we want more menhaden, whether to supply forage to predators, supply more bait for anglers and lobstermen, or provide easier fishing for guides, charter captains and recreational fishermen alike, we need to reduce the amount of menhaden ending up dead on boats of various sizes, and keep more in the ocean.

Changing who kills the menhaden won’t make a difference, because they’ll still be dead.

Changing where the menhaden are killed won’t make a difference, because they’ll still be killed.

The only way to increase menhaden numbers, which is what legitimate conservation organizations surely want to do, is to reduce landings, and kill fewer fish. 

The sooner all of the various advocacy groups accept that basic truth, and start working together to get fishing mortality back to its target level, the sooner something meaningful might get done.