TRUMP ISSUES EXECUTIVE ORDER TO "RESTORE" RECREATIONAL FISHING

 

On September 17, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Restoring American Saltwater Angling and Recreation.”

And yes, it was at least as bad as you probably expected.  It was as if the Eye of Balor had finally focused on the federal fishery management system, and began killing off its core components.

For those unfamiliar with Celtic mythology, Balor was king of the Fomorians, a race of misshapen giants, or perhaps demons, which came from beneath the sea, and were described as

“phenomenally ugly, and celebrated this ugliness, even driving out children who were normal in appearance, taking deformities as a mark of favor from their dark gods.  One Fomor might have a large arm and a small arm, while another might have two heads, and another three eyes!

“Other tales claim they were born whole enough but became strange in mind and appearance after exposure to the occult ur-light, degenerative radiances and blasphemous smokes of their eldritch rituals.”

The Eye of Balor appears to have sprung out of the latter tradition, as it gained its “immense destructive power” after Balor

“peered into a potion, [and the eye] turned venomous and caused death to anyone it gazed upon.”

Which is a pretty good analogy for what happens when Trump gets involved with fisheries management issues.

In some ways, this Executive Order came as no surprise, although there are rumors that many people within the National Marine Fisheries Service didn’t know it was going to happen.  My second blog post of 2026 warned that

“We can expect the sportfishing industry to take advantage of the current administration’s hostility to conservation measures, and its support for corporate profits, and become ever more aggressive in weakening federal fisheries management while trying harder to warp state and regional fisheries management toward greater exploitation and greater short-term economic benefits for the fishing industry, regardless of the long-term impacts on fish stocks.”

The recent Executive Order pretty well evidences that truth, and is undoubtedly the result of some major campaign contributors (and one of the things I keep wondering, ever since the EO came out, is whether Trump charges more or less for an Executive Order than he does for a pardon) talking to people high enough in the administration, and getting their priority issues included in the document. 

I don’t know whether the Executive Order was actually written by administration staff, or whether it is written by industry counsel and then just handed over to the administration for edits (the language of the document suggests that the latter might be more likely), but we can be pretty sure that Trump, who has never evidenced any interest in outdoor sports, had no idea what he was signing when he issued the EO.  Anyone who doubts that statement need only refer to his comments about another executive order, intended to facilitate sport hunting, that was issued the same day.  In that case, he said

“Lead ammunition was a problem, huh?  Is it better than other ammunition?  I assume, huh?  That’s pretty good.”

Calling him “clueless” when it comes to sportsmen’s issues would be pretty kind, although I suspect that he’s not clueless at all about who made the donations that, in his mind, justified issuing the saltwater angling-related Executive Order.

The topics included \in the EO were, for the most part, also no surprise.  Some, including the sections “Agency Implementation,” “Modernizing Data Collection Infrastructure for Recreational Catch-and-Effort Estimates,” “Restoring Integrity to Fisheries Science and Data,” and “Managing Predators” were foreshadowed in the NMFS Leadership Message issued on September 2.

And while there were some new items that the administration hadn’t seemed to focus on before, such as addressing “the decline of iconic recreational fisheries, such as the Atlantic striped bass,” “Fast-Tracking Artificial Reefs and Habitat Creation,” and “Projects for Increasing Fish Abundance,” all are presented with characteristic industry and Trumpian twists. 

New scientific efforts to conduct striped bass research (as well as research on “other depleted stocks”) will be conducted in order to

“test innovative solutions for achieving sustainable fisheries management that maximizes fishing access.  [emphasis added].”

The Executive Order talks about “Fast-Tracking Artificial Reefs and Habitat Creation,” but is primarily focused on turning played-out oil rigs (“and other-use structures with the exception of infrastructure associated with offshore wind energy [emphasis added]”) into permanent artificial reefs, a long-time goal of the red snapper-obsessed Coastal Conservation Association, and with

“the placement and management of artificial reefs within National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine National Monuments,”

which would seem an act of vandalism particularly attractive  to this administration, given its record of hostility to both National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine National Monuments.  The fact that the Executive Order would consider “habitat creation” at all is somewhat curious, given the administration’s recent actions to remove habitat damage from the list of items constituting a “take” of a listed species under the Endangered Species Act.

But then, I suspect perspective changes when donations are involved.

And the EO’s concerns with “Projects for Increasing Fish Abundance” seem to have nothing at all to do with improving spawning habitat, nursery areas, or other habitat areas of particular concern.  Instead,

“Agencies are encouraged to transition habitat restoration metrics toward production-based goals,”

which means, if you don’t speak bureaucratese, shifting away from promoting natural reproduction in recovered habitats to pumping out truckloads of hatchery-generated rubber fish of various species, with little regard for natural reproduction, native runs, or healthy ecosystems.

Which makes the whole “habitat creation “ point seem that much more hypocritical, although to be fair, it would seem that the habitat creation visualized by the Trump administration would involve toppled oil rigs, sunken vessels, and similar scrapyard-based efforts, rather than restoring anything originally created by nature, so maybe it isn’t quite as hypocritical as it first seems.

Needless to say, the recreational fishing industry is falling all over itself to praise the Executive Order.  

Jeff Angers, president and panderer-in-chief for the Center for Sportfishing Policy, gushed that

“This Executive Order is a historic recognition of what millions of American anglers and coastal communities have known for decades: marine recreational fishing deserves a management system built for the way Americans fish.  By prioritizing better data, stronger state partnerships and modern management approaches, President Trump’s order builds on our conservation gains creating a path to more reliable access and opportunity in America’s oceans.”

Glenn Hughes, president and CEO of the American Sportfishing Association, declared that

“The American Sportfishing Association thanks President Trump for his decisive action to improve management and data collection for America’s saltwater fisheries.  This Executive Order will have long-term benefits for the sportfishing industry and America’s 15.5 million saltwater recreational anglers.”

At the National Marine Manufacturers Association, President Frank Hugelmeyer said,

“Recreational boating and fishing are the foundation of America’s outdoor heritage and an important driver of our nation’s recreational economy.  Today’s actions further reaffirm the importance of ensuring Americans can access and enjoy our nation’s waters.  Access supports American manufacturing jobs and small businesses across the country.  Thank you to President Trump and his administration for recognizing the value of outdoor recreation and the American industries and communities it supports.”

And down in Houston, Texas, Pat Murray, president of the Coastal Conservation Association, also made his ritual obeisance to Trump, figuratively kissing the President’s ring while declaring,

“We’re grateful the Administration has taken this opportunity to emphasize the social and economic importance of recreational fishing.  State-based management has never been more important for our federal fisheries, and we applaud this critical need being highlighted in this Executive Order.”

It’s probably important to note that while the industry spokesmen all praised the benefits that the EO will bring to the fishing industry and to recreational fishermen, none even tried to suggest that it would improve the health of sustainability of the nation’s saltwater fish stocks. 

We should probably be grateful for that tiny sliver of honesty.

But otherwise, the Executive Order is about what one would expect. 

“To effectuate the policy described in section 1 of this order, all relevant executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall partner with States and the private sector to vigorously rebuild, expand, permit, and modernize data collection.  All such agencies shall eliminate unnecessary restrictions that harm our coastal economies, burden charter fishing businesses, and limit public access to our marine resources.  Furthermore, it is the policy of my administration to demand accurate cutting-edge data collection and empower State-Federal partnerships to produce the information needed for responsible management…

“…the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Commerce, and the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works shall, consistent with applicable law, take steps to initiate action to suspend, revise, or rescind regulations that overly burden boaters, anglers, and outdoor businesses.”

To achieve those goals, the EO directs the Secretary of Commerce to

“review targeted National Standards Guidelines issued under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act…for consistency with the purpose of this order.  Specifically, the Secretary shall, at a minimum, consider revising the Guidelines for National Standard 1 (Optimum Yield) and National Standard 2 (Best Scientific Information Available) to ensure they appropriately account for the unique biological, economic, and social characteristics of the recreational fishery, and to facilitate the rapid integration of State-level data into Federal management decisions, where appropriate.”

The Secretary of Commerce would also be expected to overhaul and/or replace the current Marine Recreational Information Program used to estimate recreational effort, catch, and landings with a new approach to data collection that would rely much more heavily on state-supplied data, while also generating

“a list of key species to use in partnership with the recreational angling community, charter captains, and State agencies to gather real-time data, deploy advanced tagging technologies, and improve catch-and-release mortality estimates,”

and developing

“a comprehensive 5-year strategic plan with clear implementation milestones to improve the collection, analysis, and application of recreational fisheries economic data to support fisheries management.  This plan shall ensure that the economic impact and value of recreational fishing, including for-hire fisheries and shoreside support industries, is fully accounted for in Federal fishery management decisions and harvest opportunities,”

thus moving the emphasis in management decisions away from good science, conservation, and sustainability and toward the economic aspects of fisheries management.

At the same time that was going on, the Executive Order would have NMFS and other relevant agencies working to relieve the regulatory and administrative burden on recreational fishermen and the recreational fishing industry, creating more artificial fish habitat (while making it easier to destroy natural structures and waterways that constitute critical habitat for various marine species), killing off more of the sharks and seals that steal anglers’ catch, while increasing fish abundance through projects that deemphasize habitat restoration in favor of “production-based goals.”

In other words, the Executive Order is just about what one would express when an angling industry focused on short-term profits buys the ear of an administration that seeks to monetize the nation’s natural resources, with neither side of the transaction having much, if any, regard for those resources’ long-term health or sustainability. 

You end up with fisheries, and a fishery management system, that look like they’ve suffered the gaze of Balor.

Speaking for myself, and I suspect for a lot of saltwater sport fishermen, we’d be far happier with an administration that ignored all of this fancy Executive Order stuff, and just managed to get the cost of diesel back under $5.00 per gallon.  Under $4.00 would be even better.

That would do more toward “restoring American saltwater angling and recreation” than all of the executive orders ever issued, the most recent order included.

 

 

 

MENHADEN: CERTAINTY WITHOUT MUCH SCIENCE

 

The menhaden silly season has gotten underway.

By “silly season,” I mean that time of the year when well-intentioned people come out of the woodwork to make all sorts of claims relating to menhaden management and the species’ role in coastal ecosystems, but have little or no factual support for anything that they choose to say.

What do we actually know about Atlantic menhaden?

We know that it is an important forage species, that helps to support finfish, bird, and marine mammal populations along the entire Atlantic coast of the United States.  We know that all of the menhaden on the East Coast belong to a single stock, that the stock spawns over the continental shelf, and that the older fish engage in long coastwide migrations, although many of them don’t commute between the extremes of the fish’s range, but rather engage in shorter travels—say, Maine to Virginia, or perhaps North Carolina. 

There are a lot more things that we simply suspect.

We suspect that menhaden might be susceptible to localized depletion, although that has never been proven through any sort of objective scientific research.  We also suspect that such localized depletion, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, might be leading to osprey experiencing nesting failure.  And we suspect that the absence of menhaden in places where they were once abundant may be affecting the presence or absence of sharks, striped bass, bluefish, and other predatory fish species.

But due to a lack of sound data, for many aspects of menhaden biology, suspecting is the best that we can do.

Unfortunately, too many menhaden advocates don’t wait for the necessary data to be developed before drawing firm conclusions about menhaden biology and the role that the fish plays in coastal ecosystems.  Thanks to a recent vote in the Virginia state legislature, that information is being gathered right now, although from a practical perspective, it probably won’t be completely collated, analyzed, peer reviewed and, finally, presented to the scientific community for another five years or so.  But the menhaden advocates don’t want to wait, so they’re making some very iffy claims that are based on very little hard science.

Thus, down in the Chesapeake Bay, we’re seeing a group that calls itself the Southern Maryland Recreational Fishing Organization planning to sue Virginia—again—over what the Organization alleges is poor menhaden management.  

It had sued once before, using the Chesapeake Legal Alliance, a non-profit legal group, as counsel, but the Court failed to hand down a decision soon enough to make a difference in that season’s harvest, although the Court seemed interested in the arguments that the Organization was making.

The planned lawsuit will make arguments similar to those made the last time around—that Virginia’s approach to menhaden management violates section 28.2-203 of the Virgina Code, which requires, among other things, that, in state fishery management plans,

“Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing while achieving the optimum yield from each fishery...”

while also being

“based upon the best scientific, economic, biological and sociological information available.”

The Organization is apparently claiming that the large-scale menhaden reduction fishery, which is responsible for most of the commercial menhaden landings, should not be permitted to fish in state waters, but rather should be pushed at least three miles offshore, into federal waters, because the state waters fishery

“threatens both the ecological health of the Bay and the livelihoods of commercial and recreational fishermen who depend on menhaden predators like striped bass.”

Unfortunately, they can’t support that allegation with any sort of hard data; the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, in its recently released Draft Addendum II to Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden for Public Comment, admitted that

“Sufficient scientific data are not available to satisfactorily address the potential for localized depletion in the Bay or to identify specific reasons for predator finfish deficiencies or low larval menhaden recruitment…”

So it is hard to understand how the Organization can claim that Virginia isn’t using “the best scientific…information available” when it established its menhaden regulations, since the best scientific information available doesn’t establish the existence of localized menhaden depletion within the Chesapeake Bay.

The case for menhaden reductions within the Bay causing osprey nest failures is nearly as hard to make, although that hasn’t stopped various organizations involved with menhaden advocacy from trying to make it, in arguments that go well beyond what can be proven today. That debate really started when a team of scientists published a paper titled “Widespread reproductive deficits in Chesapeake Bay ospreys” in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science last May.

The paper concluded that

“Although several factors may influence osprey productivity within the Chesapeake Bay, we suggest that reduced availability of Atlantic menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus) is a primary driver of poor reproductive performance within high-salinity waters.”

However, the researchers also noted that

“Several documented and suspected factors other than food stress could be contributing to nest failures within the Chesapeake Bay including stressors that influence clutch/brood survival (nest predators, weather, contaminants) and those that may disrupt breeding (nest competitors, disease),”

although they later argued against many of those factors contributing to current nest failures, and observed that

“Nesting ospreys within the higher salinity reaches of the Chesapeake Bay are believed to be menhaden dependent.  Menhaden are a schooling fish with a very high energy density making them efficient to capture and ideal for brood-rearing.  Broad patterns in food-stress metrics and reproductive deficits in 2024 suggest that menhaden abundance was inadequate to support a stable population.”

 Still, the paper’s authors, like the ASMFC, admitted that

“The impact of harvest on the abundance of adult menhaden within the Chesapeake Bay remains controversial primarily because we do not have the abundance data required to evaluate the relationship between harvest and menhaden abundance.”

Despite such caveats, the menhaden advocates and those opposed to the reduction fishery—there is substantial overlap between those two groups—latched onto the paper and used it as “evidence” that maintaining a reduction fishery withing the bay was bad not only for menhaden, but for osprey and the many other species that regularly feed on menhaden.

That has led to some criticism of the paper itself.

One such criticism recently appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, in which the author said,

“As a commercial fisherman from Maine, I was troubled by the Washington Post’s article about menhaden and starving osprey chicks in Chesapeake Bay.  It presents a simple story: commercial fishermen catch menhaden, osprey lose their food, and chicks starve.  It is compelling.  It just is not what the science proves.”

Just what the science proves—rather than merely suggests—isn’t quite clear.  What is clear is that we shouldn’t be blaming osprey nesting failure on menhaden harvest within the Chesapeake Bay until we have enough data to justify the claim.

The third and most recent example of blaming the menhaden fishery for problems popping up along the coast comes from right here in New York, where a member of New York City’s City Council has written to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, asking him to push the reduction fishery 12 miles offshore along the entire East Coast.

According to the website qns.com,

“[City Council member Joann] Ariola warned Lutnick that the overharvesting of menhaden populations—commonly known as bunker—in waters off Jamaica Bay and the Rockaway Peninsula may be contributing to increased shark sightings near New York City beaches, which she claimed was having a detrimental impact on local economies…

“’My constituents can watch menhaden being removed from the ocean just beyond New York’s jurisdiction, but neither they nor the state can reach across that line and stop it,’ Ariola said in a statement.  ‘Only the federal government can close this dangerous loophole.’

“In her letter to Lutnick, Ariola wrote that there was a ‘growing body of evidence’ that sharks are coming closer to shore as a result of decreased menhaden populations beyond the three-mile buffer.  Increased shark sightings, she said, had led to numerous beach closings in the Rockaways over the summer.”

Because this one deals with events more-or-less in my home waters, I can pick out the false statements pretty easily.  To begin, the big reduction boats rarely fish off New York.  It’s a matter of simple economics, for the farther they travel from their Virginia processing facility, the more they have to pay in fuel and other costs; as a rule, the reduction fleets rarely travel north of New Jersey, although they might appear off western Long Island every now and then.  But to say that her “constituents…watch menhaden being removed from the ocean just beyond New York’s jurisdiction” certainly overstates the situation.

So does then claim that “sharks are coming closer to shore as a result of decreased menhaden populations beyond the three-mile buffer.” 

Sharks have always been a part of New York’s coastal ecosystems, and the fish that people are now seeing close to shore—sand tigers, sandbars, duskies, spinners, blacktips, and the occasional small white—are the same species that people have been seeing close to shore for the last few centuries.  I’ve been shark fishing off New York for the last few decades, and understand how sharks move along the coast.  They’re not coming in closer because of an absence of schooling baitfish, but rather because there have been enough menhaden inshore that the sharks can shadow the bait schools that swim just beyond then surfline and still be assured of catching a meal without having to work very hard to do it.  Videos from drones flown from the beach frequently show sandbars, sand tigers, spinners and occasionally blacktips and whites keeping pace with the schools that provide feeding opportunities. 

Far from what Councilwoman Ariola seems to be claiming—that a dearth of menhaden offshore has forced sharks to come closer to New York beaches—the truth is that there have always been a lot of sharks, and a lot of menhaden, swimming very close to shore.  Although there have been days when I ran into big schools of menhaden a dozen miles off the beach, those days have been far less common than the days when I saw far the ocean dark with menhaden in less than 75 feet of water.  So in reality, I expect to find more blacktips, spinners, and small whites in those shallow depths than I would in my more usual 100 to 240-foot fishing  depths.

So, Councilwoman Ariola is also creating a false narrative based on inadequate, inaccurate information gleaned off the Internet rather than by spending time on the water and perusing scientific journals.  In doing so, she contributes to the misunderstandings that people have about menhaden, and helps to perpetuate the current lay view that menhaden are facing some kind of crisis.

She’s certain enough of her views to urge a federal cabinet secretary to accept her point of view as gospel, without first reaching out to the scientists who might be in a better place to judge whether that point of view is valid.

But it is just that sort of unjustified certainty that has shape the menhaden debate for the past decade or so, a debate driven by emotion rather than by data, which is unlikely to serve either the menhaden or the menhaden fisheries very well.

SANDBAR SHARKS: THE STOCK ASSESSMENT, AND BEYOND

 

Last week, I spent a few days down in Silver Spring, Maryland, attending the fall meeting of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Highly Migratory Species Advisory Panel.  Sharks, and sandbar sharks in particular, were a major focus on the meeting’s last day.

Sandbars have been getting a lot of attention lately, because they have been one of the species most closely linked to shark depredation—that is, sharks stealing a recreational or commercial fisherman’s catch—not only in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, but all the way up into southern New England as well.

As a result, sandbar sharks have been one of the priority species for a stock assessment.  An assessment, dubbed SEDAR 101, as it is the 101^st assessment performed under the SouthEast Data, Assessment and Review process, began back in 2025, has been delayed a bit because of staff cuts at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center, and is expected to be completed and released sometime around the middle of next year.

It’s not clear what that assessment will say, and part of that uncertainty comes from the fact that determining what might be considered “normal” or, perhaps, “historical” sandbar shark abundance is proving to be a very difficult thing to do.

There is only one index, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science Longline Survey, that goes all the way back to the early 1970s, when the sandbar shark population had not yet been depleted by the commercial shark fishery.  It suggests that sandbar sharks were far more abundant in the 1970s and early 1980s than they are today, shows the population falling to near-time series lows in the late 1980s, then vacillating between such lows and somewhat higher levels ever since, without ever approaching the abundance levels of 45 years ago.

Other indices tell a somewhat different story. 

The Northeast Fisheries Science Center and Southeast Fisheries Science Center longline surveys didn’t begin until the latter half of the 1990s.  Both recorded their lowest abundance levels during their first few years of existence—from 1995 or 1996 through 2008 or so—then saw a steady and significant increase in abundance that peaked in the late 2010s or perhaps 2020, before going into a modest but noticeable decline ever since.  The Shark Research Fishery survey, which is tied into a special commercial permit that allows a limited number of fishermen—right now, only three boats opted to obtain the permit—to target and harvest a limited number of sandbar sharks each year, recorded its lowest value in its initial year of 2008, then increased steadily through 2012, at which point it declined a bit, held steady through 2020, increased to its highest level in 2024, and then registered a marked decline in 2025.

So the survey with the longest time series suggests that current sandbar shark abundance isn’t much higher today than it was 40 years ago, although it reached somewhat higher levels in intervening years and might be trending very modestly upwards today, while the other three surveys seem to suggest that sandbar shark abundance reached a nadir in the late 1990s and 2000s before increasing substantially through the early 2020s, at which point it suffered a modest decline.

The latter three surveys seem more in accord with lay observations, but the results of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences study can’t be ignored, and add some uncertainty to the assessment.  Because sandbar sharks probably haven’t been near their historical level of abundance for close to 50 years, people often forget how abundant they once were; one member of the Advisory Panel brought up the fact that anglers were now seeing sandbar sharks in western Long Island Sound, somewhere that, according to him, they were never seen before, a statement that forced me to say that we used to see sandbars off Greenwich, Connecticut—about as far west as you can go in the Sound without leaving New England—during the 1960s, and that they only disappeared some time after that.

The record of commercial shark landings, which extends back to 1950, might have cast some light on the question of past sandbar shark abundance, but it has uncertainty problems of its own.  Such landings were low into the 1980s, then spiked sharply in 1985, hit their peak a few years later, then fell sharply again in the early 1990s.  The problem was, until 1987, those landing weren’t identified as to species, and even though sandbar shark landings began to be separated out in ’87, some landings remained “unclassified” for about another 15 years, making it difficult, if not practically impossible, for biologists to tease out how much of the commercial landings consisted of sandbar sharks, and how much was composed of other shark species.

There is also some real uncertainty about the sandbar shark’s life history, which can impact the outcome of the assessment.  For example, we know that sandbar sharks don’t pup every year, but we don’t know whether a female produces pups every two years, or every three.  The answer to that question will make a meaningful difference in how many pups a female can produce over her lifetime which, in turn, will play a role in determining how much fishing pressure the stock will be able to bear.

We also don’t know how old sandbar sharks might get, another data point relevant to both lifetime pup production and the level of fishing mortality the species might be able to support.  Because sharks are difficult to age, the maximum age is often stated as a range; the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences states that

“The species grows slowly and does not mature until it is about 25 years old.  Maximum age is unknown, but may exceed 50 years.”

However, that estimate appears to be an outlier on the high side, with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s description saying

“A slow-growing species, both sexes reach maturity around 12-13 years (about 6 feet) and are estimated to live 20+ years,”

while a paper produced for SEDAR in 2017 suggested that the maximum age for a sandbar shark is probably at least 31 years, and perhaps somewhat more.

Another problem with establishing maximum ages is that removing fish from a population can impact its age structure, by preventing fish from reaching the same age that they would in an unfished population.

So age, as well as pupping frequency, must be added to the uncertainties plaguing the sandbar shark stock assessment.

Faced with such substantial uncertainties, the stock assessment team is likely to conduct what’s called a “management strategy evaluation,” which can result in management procedures being established for the sandbar shark stock.  At the Advisory Panel meeting, the NMFS scientist heading the assessment team explained that a “robust management procedure” is effectively

“a weatherproof rulebook…

“A set of management rules that won’t lead to negative outcomes even if our data are highly uncertain, the climate shifts, or the fish (or fishermen) behave unexpectedly.

“Instead of trying to find the ‘perfect’ rule for a predictable world, a robust procedure is about finding a ‘safe’ rule for an unpredictable one.

“An empirical [management procedure] is based on data like an index of abundance that provides real time information about the stock.”

One of the possibilities is that, should the assessment recommend that sandbar sharks be removed from the prohibited list and a fishery reestablished, is that landings will be tied to some sort of index of abundance, with annual quotas rising, falling, or remaining the same based on the trends in that index.

Because many sharks share the same sort of uncertainties that plague the sandbar shark stock assessment, it is anticipated that future assessments of other shark species will follow the pattern—management strategy evaluation, management procedures, etc.—that are employed in the sandbar shark assessment.

Of course, what everyone wants to know is what NMFS will do once the sandbar shark assessment is completed.  NMFS probably wants to know the same thing.

One thing that a lot of people need to understand is that a stock assessment is just what its name suggests—it is an assessment of the health of the sandbar shark stock, which might include some projections of future abundance and recommend some possible management measures (e.g., reference points such as an overfishing limit and target fishing mortality rate or landings limit).  But the assessment is not, in and of itself, a fishery management plan; instead, it is a tool that NMFS can and will use when putting a fishery management plan in place.

The general public’s failure to understand the distinction between a stock assessment and a management plan came over loud and clear in the comments sent to SEDAR, where disgruntled fishermen, seeking to stem shark depredation, said things like

“There is an overpopulation of sandbar sharks in our waters from Ponce Inlet to Fort Pierce and I’m sure elsewhere and that’s where I normally go fishing from.  If it’s not myself it’s the person on either side of me reeling in a fish that gets eaten it’s about time to allow these fish to be harvested and thin down the numbers,”

and

“Too many sharks.  Need to cull them,”

while shark conservation advocates take the opposite tack, seemingly believe that the assessment is a proposal of some sort to resume sandbar shark harvest, and make comments such as

“This proposal is extremely devastating for the ocean and for people.  Sharks are vital for healthy marine ecosystems, so we must protect them not kill them and I am firmly opposed to any plan that increases shark fishing quotas,”

and

“Commercial shark long lining needs to remain banned as Atlantic sandbar sharks still had a 70% depletion in their populations in 2017.  They are still considered an endangered species and this will have dire consequences for the ecosystem.  An ecosystem without sharks will die and there will be no more fish to be able to fish up.”

It’s somewhat astounding how much the public gets wrong.  Not only is the stock assessment not a management plan, but without a completed assessment, it’s impossible to say whether sandbar sharks are rebuilding to historical levels of abundance, much less that they are “overpopulated,” “endangered,” in need of culling, or of being thinned down.

However, it is clear that NMFS intends to use the stock assessment, once it is finished, as part of its strategy to reduce shark depredation on the recreational and commercial fisheries.  At the Advisory Panel meeting, the agency made a presentation in which it noted that

“Public perception suggests the stock of sandbar shark has recovered from the overfished status determined in 2018.  Sandbar shark are one of the primary species associated with depredation events.”

Of course, public perception isn’t always right (recall how many comments sent in to SEDAR were from people who perceived the stock assessment to be a fishery management plan), and even if the sandbar shark is no longer deemed to be overfished, it’s population may still be—and probably is—a long way from fully rebuilt.

Despite all of the comments suggesting that the sandbar shark population has “exploded,”—24 such comments having been sent in to SEDAR alone—the sandbar shark’s life history renders explosive population growth impossible.  Think about it:  if it takes at least 12 years for a shark to mature and start producing pups of its own, then increasing sandbar shark abundance can only be a very slow process, because the spawning stock biomass can’t even start to grow until a dozen years after management measures are first adopted; until then, all the management measures are doing is preventing the spawning stock from declining as quickly as it had been before. 

Thus, NMFS is focusing much of its anti-depredation efforts on measures that focus on reducing depredation, rather than reducing shark abundance.  It is trying to determine where and when depredation is increasing, trying to determine why depredation may be increasing and, if it can get a handle on those factors, is also trying to determine whether the likelihood of shark depredation at certain times, in certain places, and perhaps in certain fisheries can be predicted, and whether, by predicting the likelihood of depredation, fishermen will be able to avoid its worst effects.

NMFS is also looking into the possibility of developing effective and practical technologies that will discourage depredation events.

And if the sandbar shark stock assessment (and future stock assessments for other species that engage in depredation, particularly bull sharks) indicate that it can be done without leading to overfishing and/or an overfished stock, NMFS will look into the possible solution that so many in the angling community suggest—increasing shark landings and so reducing shark abundance.

But that isn’t as easy an answer as some would like to believe.  Even if SEDAR 101 finds that sandbar sharks are no longer overfished and well on their way toward recovery (the current target recovery date is 2070, still 44 years away), that they can safely be removed from the prohibited species list, and that the stock can support some level of commercial and/or recreational fishing, relaxed regulations are not likely to lead to a substantial reduction in the sandbar shark population, nor are they, in and of themselves, likely to lead to a significant reduction in shark depredation.

That’s because relaxed regulations aren’t likely to lead to a significantly larger number of sandbar shark removals.  One thing that became very clear at the Advisory Panel meeting was that commercial shark fishermen are already having trouble finding markets for the sharks that they catch; they aren’t coming close to catching the entire commercial quota.  Thus, unless fishermen can find a way to open new markets, they will have little interest in an increased sandbar shark quota that only provides them with access to fish that they will be unable to sell.

As far as the recreational side goes, I noted at the meeting that even back in the 1970s and ‘80s, when there were neither size nor bag limits for sandbar sharks, it was very unusual for an angler to retain and eat them; their flesh was edible, but not prized, and the sandbar shark’s tough, knife-dulling skin made gutting and cutting one up almost more trouble than the meat was worth.  So allowing anglers to take sandbar sharks home probably won’t lead to significantly increased landings.  And the other source of recreational removals, tournament entries, are also unlikely to come into play, for if the sharks entered aren’t kept for food, and instead end up carted off to the town dump, public backlash is likely to be substantial.  We saw that in Florida a few years ago, when a kill tournament largely targeting bull sharks resulted in significant public outrage, and even threats of physical violence aimed at its organizers (after that session of the meeting ended, another Advisory Panel member walked over to me, told me that he was one of the people who organized the Florida tournament, and acknowledged the public outrage), while this summer, there were also much more measured expressions of discontent when the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo decided to again award prizes for the largest sharks entered.

So, where does that put the sandbar shark, and where is NMFS likely to go with its efforts to reduce shark depredation?

The sandbar shark stock assessment should be completed sometime next summer, and assuming that it passes peer review—not a given for an assessment containing a lot of unknowns and perhaps an untested and potentially controversial management strategy evaluation—it will guide NMFS’ management efforts.  The stock assessment MIGHT find that the sandbar shark stock is no longer overfished, and that it might be safely removed from the prohibited species list, but that is not guaranteed. 

Depending on what level of abundance is eventually used as a baseline for a healthy biomass, the assessment might find that the stock is still overfished, no longer overfished but with a lot of rebuilding left to do, well on its way toward rebuilding or—perhaps the least likely—fully rebuilt.

And depending on that finding, NMFS might change commercial and/or recreational regulations regarding sandbar shark landings, perhaps partly in the hopes that higher landings might reduce depredation.

But right now, all of those things lie ahead of us.

Right now, we can only wait and watch as SEDAR develops its approach to assessing the sandbar shark stock, an approach that might be used to assess other shark stocks in the future.

COURT FINDS THAT NORTH CAROLINA FISHERIES MANAGERS VIOLATED THE PUBLIC TRUST

 

On August 17, 2026, a Superior Court judge in Wake County, North Carolina found that, in managing its marine fisheries, North Carolina “has failed to meet its ‘obligation to manage and protect fisheries for the benefit of the general public’ as required under the public trust doctrine, failed to ‘keep fisheries safe from injury, harm, or destruction for all time’ as required under [the North Carolina state constitution], and failed to ‘protect the harvestable fish population for the benefit of all its citizenry’ as [also] required under [the state constitution].”

The decision was handed down in the matter of Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina, a lawsuit filed in 2020, but not heard until early 2026. Since the suit began, North Carolina has filed various motions seeking to keep the matter from going to trial, and has taken appeals to a higher court when its motions were denied. However, all of the state’s efforts to defeat the plaintiffs on procedural grounds failed, and in January 2026, the trial finally began.

The initial phase of the trial lasted for five weeks, and involved extensive testimony from expert witnesses, state officials, and recreational fishermen. Its sole purpose was to determine whether the state was liable to the public for its failures to maintain healthy stocks of marine fish.

The court decided that it was.

In reaching its decision, the court made over 300 findings of fact, including findings that

Most North Carolina citizens who are shore-based anglers have limited boat access or no boat access, and for that reason, they have historically depended on certain readily accessible, mostly estuarine finfish species. Those species include Atlantic croaker, blue crab, Eastern oyster, flounder of various species, hard clam, kingfishes (sea mullet), red drum, river herring, spot, spotted seatrout, striped bass, and weakfish…

In the 1960s and 1970s, sought-after fish like spot, Atlantic croaker, weakfish, and flounder were highly abundant. Recreational anglers with little experience could harvest dozens of weakfish in a single day on the Pamlico Sound, stock their freezers on vacation trips, catch flounder from docks along the banks of the sound, and harvest enough Atlantic croaker for neighborhood fish fries.

In the 1970s, however, commercial finfish landings increased dramatically. Between 1972 and 1981 alone, commercial finfish landings increased from 40 million pounds to over 90 million pounds…

Commercial finfish landings then began a precipitous decline in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, they are half what they were in the early 1970s. [citations omitted]

Those findings are of critical importance, as they go to the heart of the case—the argument that North Carolina has an obligation to manage marine fish stocks for the benefit of the general public, and the argument that a provision of the North Carolina state constitution, adopted in 2018, granted individuals a constitutionally-guaranteed right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife.

In 2022, the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s ruling against the state’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The appellate court’s decision said, in part, that “the State contends that the language of this [constitutional] provision places no affirmative constitutional mandate on the State to preserve the right of the people to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife for the public good. We disagree.”

Instead, the court found that the right to harvest fish would be meaningless unless the state managed fish stocks for long-term sustainability, saying “[T]he General Assembly, when drafting the proposed amendment, intended to create an affirmative duty on the State to preserve the right of the people to fish and harvest fish. However, the right to fish and harvest fish would be rendered meaningless without access to fish. Therefore, the State’s duty necessarily includes some concomitant duty to keep fisheries safe from injury, harm, or destruction for all time.”

While much of the court’s decision focused on the public trust and constitutional issues, it also found that the state failed to meet its statutory obligations to manage marine fish stocks pursuant to the Fisheries Reform Act, which was adopted by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1997, and requires that the state’s fisheries be managed for “long-term viability.”

The court decision notes that Katherine Rawls, the North Carolina Department of Marine Fisheries’ Fisheries Director, stated on the record that “long-term viability is the standard” for the state’s management of marine fisheries, and that long-term viability “means more than just sustainable harvest.” Other state witnesses supported her assertions, and none disagreed.

Experienced fisheries scientists, who served as expert witnesses, also supported Ms. Rawls’ statements.

The court found that, in 2017, North Carolina established a set of criteria for whether a fish stock was viable. “Those viability criteria required that a stock cannot be overfished, that overfishing of the stock cannot be occurring, and that the stock must exhibit the following: stable or increasing trends in average length and weight, stable catch per unit effort, stable spawning stock biomass, stable juvenile abundance indexes based on historical averages, stable age structure that includes representatives of the older age classes, and stable or declining trends in fishing mortality.”

The court also noted that when plaintiffs, during the course of pre-trial discovery, served an interrogatory on the state, asking which North Carolina-managed fish stocks exhibit long-term viability, the state proved evasive, only replying that it “makes no contention regarding whether any of the species listed exhibit long-term viability.”

However, Dr. Louis Daniel, who worked for the North Carolina Department of Marine Fisheries for 21 years, served as the state’s Marine Fisheries Director from 2007 to 2016, and appeared as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, testified that of the 13 stocks managed by North Carolina, five were overfished, one is experiencing overfishing, and the status of the other seven is unknown; thus none of them could be said to exhibit long-term viability under the criteria established in 2017. Dr. Daniel’s testimony then went a step further, when he said that after having the Fisheries Reform Act in place for nearly 30 years, “we haven’t got a success…and we haven’t rebuilt any stocks.”

For eight days of the five-week trial, plaintiffs experts testified as to how North Carolina’s marine fisheries management failed to achieve long-term viability for any species, failed to rebuild overfished stocks, failed to end overfishing, failed to get bycatch under control, and failed to provide adequate fisheries law enforcement. The court noted that North Carolina failed to rebut such expert testimony. Moreover, the court found that “In contrast, the State did not present any expert who testified as to the sufficiency of the State’s management at the system level (i.e., the agency level or commission level)…Instead, the State took an unusual approach: Rather than retain independent, qualified, outside experts in fisheries management, the State simply designated seven of its DMF employee fact witnesses as experts, then sought to elicit various expert conclusions from them about their employer.”

Given such an approach, it might not be surprising that the court found in plaintiffs’ favor. However, the state’s decision not to rebut the plaintiffs’ experts’ testimony with its own expert witnesses has elicited criticism from members of the commercial fishing community.

Although the plaintiffs’ core argument was that North Carolina failed to properly manage its marine fisheries, the focus of that argument was that the state failed to properly regulate its commercial, rather than its recreational, fisheries. Shrimp trawling within the Pamlico Sound, and what the plaintiffs considered underregulated gill net fisheries, along with the bycatch and dead discards such fisheries allegedly produce, were the targets of particular criticism.

Dr. Daniel, in a report provided by him as an expert witness, noted that North Carolina “allow[s] commercial gears that have been prohibited in other jurisdictions because of their extraordinarily high levels of bycatch,” singling out estuarine shrimp trawling and gillnets. That led the court to find, “That allowance has created a management problem virtually unique to North Carolina, making the State’s disregard of the high number of discards from those gears highly risk-prone and contrary to sound management principles.”

Commercial fishing interests thus felt targeted by the lawsuit, but without anyone to advocate for their interests in the matter. The North Carolina Fisheries Association (NCFA), the commercial industry’s primary trade organization, sought to intervene in the action as a defendant, but its motion to do so was denied by the court, making it impossible for the association to present witnesses or brief issues of concern to the state’s commercial fishermen.

The denial of that motion, coupled with North Carolina’s apparent unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to rebut the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, left some commercial fishermen questioning the fairness of the process. One fisherman, posting on Facebook, complained that

the State appears to have mounted a defense so inadequate that the judge repeatedly describes important parts of CCA’s case as ‘unrebutted,’ ‘uncontested,’ or met with ‘no evidence to the contrary.’ Meanwhile, the commercial fishermen, seafood businesses and working waterfronts that may actually bear the consequences were not permitted to be parties defending their own interests…

And where was the serious defense of the other side? Where was the history of declining commercial effort, decades of increased regulations and gear improvements, natural boom-and-bust cycles, recreational mortality, habitat loss, water quality, development and environmental change? Where was the challenge to treating declining commercial landings as if they were simply a graph of declining fish abundance? …

Who actually defended North Carolina’s commercial fishermen and North Carolina seafood consumers who depend on them?

Fairness is always subjective, and the commercial fishermen’s perception of inequity doesn’t necessarily mean that anything unfair occurred, but people’s perceptions will undoubtedly affect how they approach the next steps of the process.

In this case, the next step is the “remedy” phase of the trial.

Now that the court has established liability, it has given the parties 45 days to prepare a report intended to help the court craft a remedy for the state’s failure to properly manage its fisheries. The plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction requiring North Carolina to take corrective actions to rebuild its fisheries and ensure their long-term viability. Restrictions, and possibly even a ban, on shrimp trawling in North Carolina’s estuaries, strict regulation of gill net fisheries, hard-poundage annual catch limits, and increased data collection requirements are all likely to be considered.

State officials are expected to ask the court to craft a compromise remedy that allows fish stocks to rebuild without threatening the livelihoods of commercial fishermen and radically reshaping the state’s commercial fishing industry. Although commercial fishing practices are targeted in the lawsuit, whatever remedy the court ultimately imposes will probably also have a significant impact on recreational fishermen, as it would be very difficult to rebuild depleted fish stocks unless additional restrictions are placed on both the commercial and recreational sectors.

So far, the state has not issued a formal response to the court’s decision, so it is not clear whether it will accept the finding of liability, or whether it will seek to have the Court of Appeals overturn the decision. However, if an appellate court upholds the trial court’s findings, or if the state chooses not to appeal, the decision in Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina is likely to have a profound impact on how North Carolina manages its marine fisheries.

The decision’s impacts outside of North Carolina aren’t as clear.

Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina probably represents the first time that a court anywhere in the nation has found that the public trust doctrine—the principle that the government holds certain natural resources in trust, maintaining and protecting them on behalf of the public as a whole—creates an affirmative duty for the state to maintain marine fish stocks at healthy and sustainable levels. While the decision isn’t binding on courts outside of North Carolina, it does constitute a persuasive precedent that courts in other states could choose to follow if they found its logic compelling.

If other states adopt similar interpretations of the public trust doctrine, it could usher in a new era of fisheries management, in which states could no longer ignore overfished stocks and chronic overfishing, but instead would be held responsible for the state of their marine fish populations.

At the same time, the court’s decision was very North Carolina-specific, as it was heavily reliant on a section of the state constitution which created a right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife, as well as on the language of North Carolina’s Fisheries Reform Act. While at least nine coastal states have, over the past twenty years, added language to their state constitutions that created a right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife, arguably making the decision’s constitutional basis relevant to those states as well, the Fisheries Reform Act is unique to North Carolina, rendering those sections of the decision that relate to that statute, including the long-term viability standard, unique to North Carolina as well.

Thus, the court’s finding that North Carolina is legally obligated to manage its marine fish stocks for the benefit of the general public is only an intermediate step in the campaign to improve the state’s saltwater fisheries management program.

Should the decision not be overturned on appeal, and should the court be willing to impose a remedy that will materially improve North Carolina’s approach to marine fisheries management, Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina will, at the least, lead to better fisheries management outcomes in a state with a long history and deep traditions of commercial and recreational fishing.

Should courts in other states follow the precedent set by the North Carolina court, then Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina may earn its place as a landmark decision that changed the course of saltwater fisheries management in multiple jurisdictions.

It is far too early to know what the final legacy of this lawsuit will be, but it is not too early to hope that Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina will go far to change the management status quo, not only in North Carolina, but on every coast of the United States.

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This essay first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/.

 

A BUNKER MENTALITY

 

The National Fisherman magazine recently reported that

“Chesapeake Bay menhaden fishing protesters in small craft continue to harass Ocean Harvesters boats and fishermen by circling in front of the firms’ [sic] steamers attempting to keep the boats from making sets.”

For those who still sometimes have trouble keeping all the players straight, Ocean Harvesters is the United States company that owns all of the big reduction fishery purse seiners operating on the East Coast (along with others operating in the Gulf of Mexico), and sells all of the fish that it catches to Omega Protein, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Canadian aquaculture and ocean products company Cooke, Inc.).

Monty Diehl, Ocean Harvesters’ chief executive officer complained that

“Over the past three years we have seen a few dozen of these recreational fishing boats racing to get in front of us and just circling so we either can’t get to where we want to go, or to try and block us from setting our nets…

“These go hand-in-hand with the threats we get on socia media and the coordinated effort to disrupt our operations.

“We have notified Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) on a few occasions when these things happen, but if we can’t get the registration number from the boat, then VMRC does not have anything to go on, and most of these interactions happen quickly, and after a few minutes these folks leave, probably realizing that VMRC may be coming out.”

That sort of behavior garnered significant public attention three years ago, when someone riding a jet ski—very possibly an angler or someone concerned with conservation issues in the Chesapeake Bay—engaged in targeted harassment against commercial menhaden vessels.  As described in The National Fisherman,

“As an Ocean Harvesters crew was making a set, the rider of the jet ski ran his boat between the two purse boats and was able to get inside the set and out before the set was completed…

“The jet skier rode inside the net, sprayed the crew with his wake, and yelled obscenities at them, according to an account by the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition…”

 It’s difficult to understand how anyone could consider such behavior even marginally acceptable.

People are free to dislike the menhaden reduction fishery.

They are free to try to have the fishery pushed out of the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps pushed out of Virginia waters, and maybe even legislated out of existence.  They are free to ask fishery managers to reduce the menhaden quota, place restrictions on when it may be landed, and/or allocate some or all of the reduction fleet quota, which is held solely by the Commonwealth of Virginia, to be reallocated to other states and to other sectors of the menhaden fishery.

But what people are not free to do is risk the safety, and perhaps even the lives, of menhaden fishermen by recklessly operating watercraft near their vessels, showering them with water, and trying to prevent them from pursuing what is, up to now, a completely legal fishery, cooperatively managed through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

Virginia legislators recognized that truth after the jet ski incident, and passed legislation making knowingly and intentionally impeding commercial fishing activity, or impeding the commercial fishing activity of a commercial fishing vessel, a Class I misdemeanor, punishable by as much as 12 months in prison and/or a $2,500 fine.  The legislation had extremely broad support, passing by a vote of 99-0 in the House and 39-1 in the Senate.

Ocean Harvesters’ Diehl said that the legislation

“greatly reduced the number of incidents [of people harassing the company’s reduction boats] for that 2024 fishing season, but it started back up in 2025.”

Why?

It’s a given that the reduction fishery is disliked by both Virginia anglers and much of the conservation community in the Chesapeake Bay.  The boats are big, they’re easy to spot when they’re fishing, and they kill a lot of fish at one time.  Plus, over the years, the menhaden industry has sometimes acted with high-handed arrogance, such as it did back in 2019, when it ignored the ASMFC’s then-new 51,000 metric ton Bay Cap on reduction industry landings, and announced toward the end of that summer that it was going to exceed that limit in the Bay waters off Virginia, which had not yet put the Cap in place.

But there are a lot of fishing activities that aren’t particularly popular with anglers and various conservation groups.  Depending on where and when it’s going on, and what fish are affected, gill netting, pelagic longlining, bottom and midwater trawls, and even things like pinhooking striped bass have received their share of fairly vehement criticism, but you generally don’t see recreational fishermen aggressively harassing vessels engaged in such activity.

The menhaden reduction fishery, though, is different.  I can recall how it was more than 50 years ago, when I was still in my teens and growing up on western Long Island Sound, and the reduction boats were operating off the western Connecticut coast.  There was a special hostility directed at them that even the fishermen poaching striped bass for market— Connecticut was the first “gamefish” state on the coast—were spared.  Some particularly aggressive anglers went so far as to find cracked automobile engine blocks, and weld chains and grappling hooks to them, in the hope that when the “bunker boats” set their purse seines in the Sound’s shallow waters, they would reach all the way to the bottom, get snarled by the makeshift booby traps, and ruin the attempted sets and hopefully ruin the nets as well.

Since then, angler attitudes have only gotten worse.

I have to believe that the various menhaden advocacy groups are responsible for much of that, not only fanning the flames but perhaps also igniting them in an already highly combustible angling community.

That doesn’t mean that the advocates don’t make good points.

Menhaden are an important forage fish, preyed upon by other fish, marine mammals, and piscivorous birds.  When they are scarce or absent from a particular place, the ecosystem responds by placing greater demands on other forage species, by predators changing their behavior and, if some research is to be accepted at face value, by reduced reproductive success.

It is possible, although not yet proven, that intense local fishing activity can cause “localized depletion” of the menhaden population, perhaps particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, and result in a cascade of negative impacts.  The current Chesapeake Bay Cap on reduction fishery harvest is a precautionary measure intended to minimize the likelihood of such depletion occurring, and the ASMFC’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board is currently holding hearings on whether the Bay Cap should be reduced from its current 51,000 metric ton level.

And, last year, a stock assessment found that, due to errors in previous assessments, menhaden fecundity (used as a proxy for spawning stock biomass) was significantly smaller than previously believed, and that the fishing mortality rate experienced by the stock was significantly higher, although the stock was not yet overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

There are legitimate scientific arguments that can be made to reduce overall menhaden landings, including both the landings of the reduction fleet and the landings of the growing segment of the menhaden industry who supply menhaden as bait.

But that’s not the way the menhaden advocates are operating.  Instead of focusing on the scientific arguments, they spend most of their efforts in making emotional appeals that revile the reduction fleet, with criticisms based not on hard data, but rather on the size of its vessels or the nationality of its customers.

Consider a group that calls itself “The Forage Fish Campaign.”  Its web page declares that

“Industrial fishing vessels are stripping billions of pounds of menhaden, herring, mackerel, shad, and river herring from American coastal waters every year—collapsing ecosystems, destroying livelihoods, and shipping the profits overseas…

“Industrial fishing operations are extracting billions of pounds of menhaden, herring, mackerel, and shad every year from American waters.  Not for food.  Not for bait.  The great majority is for industrial processing—ground into meal and oil, shipped overseas to feed foreign fish farms and factory livestock.  [emphasis added]”

It ends with the declaration

“This.  Stops.  Now.”

The message is clearly intended to foment public animosity toward the large-volume, low-value (per-pound) fisheries that typically target forage species, including menhaden.  After all, they are “industrial fishing operations,” that ship their profits overseas, and often sell product to foreign fish farms and factory livestock operations.

What red-blooded American wouldn’t despise the sort of folks who do that?

Perhaps someone who actually understood biology and fisheries management.

From a biological standpoint, it makes no difference to a fish stock whether it is caught by a handful of “industrial” vessels, or by a relative multitude of small-scale fishermen.  So long as the stock is not subject to overfishing—and the last stock assessment made it clear that menhaden are not—it doesn’t matter to the fish whether they are killed by a big net or a small one.

A menhaden killed by a tackle shop owner tossing a cast net is just as dead as one killed by a reduction boat.  Its removal from the population has the same impact.

But the reduction boats are just bigger, more attractive targets for the advocates’ bile.  Something that they hope they can convince people to hate.

The references to “shipping the profits overseas” and shipping fish overseas to be used as feed in “foreign” fish farms follows a similar logic.  The idea is to convince people that the “industrial” fleet is engaged in activities that, at their core, are somehow un-American. 

Of course, such comments ignore the fact that Ocean Harvesters is an American—not a foreign—company, and that the boats are crewed by American fishermen who spend their income from the fishery supporting American families, buying or renting American real estate, and patronizing American stores in their home towns. 

And while most of the menhaden are shipped overseas, no one, other than some people trying to minimize trawler bycatch, seems concerned that the Alaskan walleye pollock trawl fishery—the largest single fishery in the United States, when measured by poundage caught—ships the majority of its product overseas (or that those 3 billion tons of pollock that are landed each year are caught by “industrial” boats).

That sort of anti-foreign rancor is generally saved for the menhaden reduction fleet.

Similarly, The Forage Fish Campaign seems bound to attack the reduction industry because the menhaden it catches are used “Not for food.  Not for bait,” but rather for aquaculture and agricultural feeds, which again might be good for growing hostility against the reduction industry, but makes no logical sense.

After all, there aren’t many people in the United States who will want to use menhaden for food, and it’s not clear why using menhaden for bait—bait that is used to catch what are essentially luxury species such as lobster or blue crabs—is a higher and better use of the menhaden resource than using it to feed the Atlantic salmon imported from Canada or Norway or Scotland and eaten by millions of Americans, or using it to feed the birds raised on “factory livestock” farms to produce your kids’ chicken nuggets.

Once more, it’s all provocative language intended to create hostility toward a particular fishery, which makes no logical sense at all.

Still, that provocative language works.  We see far too many anglers blaming the reduction fishery—not the entire menhaden fishery, but the reduction fishery alone—for every ill that besets coastal fisheries, from a lack of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay to the current state of the striped bass population.

And for some, whether cursed with poor judgment, psychological problems, or a strong taste for alcohol, their hostility for the reduction fleet turns from mere disdain to the sort of directed harassment that Diehl describes and the Virginia legislature tried to prevent. 

It’s not unlikely that somewhere down the road, some angler is going to do something stupid and threaten, harass, or otherwise interfere with a reduction boat when law enforcement happens by, and the new, stricter Virginia criminal sanctions will be applied for the first time.  And, unfortunately, it is very possible that, at some point, some angler is going to do something stupid and someone—maybe the angler, maybe a menhaden fisherman, maybe both, maybe someone else—is going to be injured or killed.

And that angler, and maybe some injured party, is going to pay the price.

But it will be those who warped people’s perceptions, intentionally whipped up the public’s emotions, and fomented increasing hostility against the menhaden industry, who will truly deserve the blame.