ARE THE GREAT WHATEVER COUNTS AS GREAT AS FOLKS PROMISE?

 

In recent years, “great” fish counts have become all the rage, particularly in the southeast, where the fishing tackle industry, boating industry, and anglers’ rights groups have been trying to use them as a way to challenge the peer-reviewed stock assessments and increase recreational landings.

The so-called “Great Red Snapper Count,” which was completed a few years ago, was the first such effort, but they all follow the same basic pattern.  First, the industry groups donate enough money to their local congressmen to get their attention.  Then, they convince one or two of those congressmen—and, depending on how big the contributions were, it might not take much convincing—to attach a rider to an appropriations bill, which will provide funding for a comprehensive study of the species in question, performed by academic researchers, that the industry believes will discredit the federal stock assessments and prove that federal fisheries regulations are too restrictive.

The resulting federal appropriation is typically large enough to fund a team of very competent scientists, and provide them with the support they need to conduct an intensive count of whatever the target species is, perhaps even letting them look for fish in places where no one has ever looked before.  

Given the intensity of the search, there is a very good chance that more fish are going to be found.

When more fish are found, the industry then argues that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between population size and recreational landings, and insists that recreational regulations be relaxed.

But things aren’t that cut-and-dried.

The pioneering Great Red Snapper Count provides a perfect example of that.

As noted in Gulf Coast Fisherman, the newsletter of the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant program, the Great Red Snapper Count found that there were about three times as many red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico than previously believed, with about two-thirds of those fish widely scattered over open, low-profile bottom.  As the newsletter explained,

“The difference noted above was driven primarily by the Great Red Snapper Count team’s ability to survey large portions of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico not surveyed by NOAA given limited resources.  These regions are known as unclassified bottom and consist of vast expanses of sand and mud, along with features like extensive, partially buried oil and gas pipelines that hadn’t been studied by fisheries scientists.  When the Great Red Snapper Count team tallied the red snapper residing over unclassified bottom, they learned that these areas actually contain a massive ‘cryptic biomass’ of red snapper estimated at 68 million fish!  This was most apparent in the Florida region, where unclassified bottom supports about 31 million, or nearly two-thirds, of the region’s 48 million red snapper.”

Yet that simple finding didn’t mean that landings could automatically be tripled, nor did it mean that previous estimates of red snapper abundance were categorically wrong.  As the National Marine Fisheries Service observed,

“The abundance estimates for high relief natural and artificial structures, where most fishing occurs, are similar to that of the 2018 assessment.

“The Great Red Snapper count confirmed previous estimates of the biomass on the habitats associated with the fishery, high relief areas such as reefs and ledges.  This previously unknown biomass associated with low relief, sand and mud bottom habitat is a welcome revelation of this research.  The discovery of additional biomass is good news which may help ease some management restrictions.  [emphasis added]”

Thus, the previous federal red snapper surveys were accurate as far as they went, but NMFS simply lacked the resources to search every nook and cranny of the Gulf of Mexico just in case red snapper happened to be there.  So they looked at the places where people fished, and got a fairly accurate count of the snapper that lived there.  But they missed the greater biomass of fish that lived where no one had previously looked, and few people ever fished.

Still, concentrating survey efforts in places where people fish might make some sort of sense, for the same article in Gulf Coast Fisherman also informs us that

“One of the four main methods used during the Great Red Snapper Count was a Gulf-wide high-reward tagging study.  Doing this study, scientists tagged and released thousands of red snapper across the U.S. Gulf of Mexico at artificial reefs and natural habitats and relied on fishermen to report the capture of tagged fish.  The results of the tagging study was surprising—approximately 30% of tagged red snapper were recaptured!  To put this quantity into context, scientists consider a recapture rate of 10% to be excellent, and anything higher is very unusual.  The 30% tag return rate signifies impressive fishermen involvement in the Great Red Snapper Count, but it also illustrates high fishing effort for red snapper at artificial and natural habitats.  [emphasis added]”

That immediately raises the question of whether the 68 million red snapper that the Great Red Snapper Count found on unclassified structure are even relevant to the recreational fishery, or to recreational fishery management.  After all, if anglers are only interacting with the fish on high-profile structure, and the fish on unclassified structure don’t move onto the ledges and reefs—and we have no idea whether they do or not—it is only the fish on the high-profile structure that need to be managed.

 

It’s far too early to make that decision right now.  But the fact that most of the fish in the eastern Gulf off Florida were found on unclassified structure—meaning that the local population there is far larger than previously believed—yet Florida charter boat captains have already started complaining that red snapper size and abundance have been steadily declining even under current regulations, suggests that the fish living on open bottom might not be having too much of an impact on the recreational red snapper fishery.

The Gulf Coast Fisherman summed up the situation very well.

“The Great Red Snapper Count results reveal that there may be roughly three times more red snapper in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico than we once thought.  This is great news!  Moreover, the impressive number of red snapper residing over unclassified bottom represents an important discovery.  It’s possible that these fish may help to replenish the reef aggregations so that those areas of natural and artificial structure can continue to sustain high levels of harvest.  Future studies will likely investigate the ecological roles of the red snapper inhabiting unclassified bottom, as well as their specific contributions to the Gulf of Mexico red snapper stock.

“The findings from this project may fundamentally change the way the Gulf of Mexico red snapper stock is assessed by federal and state officials…The results of the Great Red Snapper Count are clearly impressive, but exactly how these results will impact commercial and recreational fishermen is less apparent.  In particular, it’s unlikely that quotas or bag limits will be tripled.  Since Gulf of Mexico red snapper are still under a rebuilding plan, and harvest from natural and artificial habitats is very high as confirmed by the Great Red Snapper Count team, more red snapper doesn’t necessarily mean more harvest.  One thing is for certain:  fisheries managers responsible for making decisions about Gulf of Mexico red snapper will move forward cautiously to ensure that the results of decades of diligent rebuilding are preserved.  [emphasis added]”

That’s just what happened.

NMFS advised that

“Results of the Great Red Snapper Count and [an] interim analysis are expected to be reviewed by independent experts.  The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee will also review the results…We will continue to work with our partners on the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council and its Scientific and Statistical Committee to peer-review the assessment and adjust red snapper management as appropriate.”

And as things turned out, the subsequent peer review of the latest Gulf of Mexico red snapper stock assessment raised some questions about the Great Red Snapper Count data.  A summary of one peer review meeting noted that

“The overall conclusion of the group was that the presented stock assessment model was not suitable to proceed to an Operational Assessment and that instead a Benchmark Assessment and another full review should be conducted.”

While all of the criticism did not revolve around Great Red Snapper Count data, with much addressing how the Gulf should be divided up into separate areas, how to incorporate the Great Red Snapper Count data was also an issue, with the meeting summary saying

“the SSC thought it prudent to create a topical working group to explore how to better include information gathered from the [Great Red Snapper Count] in the stock assessment process.  The SSC recommended that some of the principal investigators, or other available contributors from the GRSC could participate in the workgroup.  The results of these deliberations would be made available, so that documentation of how or when GRSC data is integrated could be reported out.”

While such cautious approach might seem prudent, it outraged the tackle industry/boating industry/anglers’ rights crowd threw the expected hissy fit when NMFS didn’t immediately allow a larger recreational harvest.  The Coastal Conservation Association put out a press release whining about how

“it would have been reasonable to expect the results of the GRSC simply become the new benchmark.  NOAA insisted that those findings would have to be calibrated and synched up with the data streams and techniques it had used in the past.  The same data streams and techniques that the GRSC had shown to be inaccurate by a factor of at least three.”

Of course, the last sentence of that quote wasn’t quite true, as the Great Red Snapper Count confirmed the accuracy of federal mangers’ estimates of red snapper populations on high-profile structure; NMFS may never have looked on the unclassified bottom because it lacked the resources to do so, but that has little or nothing to do with the accuracy of its data or techniques.

But the CCA just needed to throw a tantrum, when it didn’t get the result that it had been more-or-less guaranteeing its members since sometime around 2017.

For them, the Great Red Snapper Count wasn’t really “great” at all, even though it did significantly expand or knowledge about red snapper distribution in the Gulf of Mexico.

Still, that didn’t stop the CCA and fellow travelers from working to spend more taxpayer dollars trying to expand the “great fish count” approach to other species and other places.

Their next approach was a simple riff on the first, the so-called “Great South Atlantic Red Snapper Count.”  It followed the established format, in which friendly lawmakers had Congress appropriate cash for a study of red snapper abundance, that would hopefully (from the industry/anglers’ rights standpoint) prove that there were more fish around than NMFS believed.

As described by the ever-reactionary Blair Wickstrom, in the pages of Florida Sportsman,

“As it stands today, the current stock assessment, which indicates we’re overfishing red snapper, is set in stone until 2028.  However, we have hope that the independent 30-month study dubbed the Great South Atlantic Red Snapper Count will provide much-needed clarity on the true stock assessment.”

It’s just not clear what Wickstrom, and the rest of the industry/anglers’ rights cabal, expect the “true” stock assessment to say, and how they expect it to help them.

Nobody disagrees that the South Atlantic red snapper stock is responding well to management measures.  Although the stock was badly overfished as recently as 2010, when spawning stock biomass was only 9% of the target level and the fishing mortality rate was more than four times the fishing mortality target, things have improved since then.  In June 2005, NMFS found that the stock was neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

So, red snapper abundance, per se, isn’t really the problem.

Yes, a bigger estimate of spawning stock biomass might lead to a somewhat larger annual catch limit, but the recreational sector already enjoys a reasonably high annual catch limit right now.  In 2025, the annual catch limit amounted to 509,000 red snapper, which should have been enough to keep most recreational fishermen happy, even if the commercial sector gets to land about 28% of the fish.

A low annual catch limit isn’t the problem.

The problem is that out of that 509,000-fish limit, about 475,000 are caught by recreational fishermen, then tossed back over the side of the boat to die, and never end up in fishermen’s coolers.

The recreational and commercial fishermen are forced to share only the remaining 34,000 red snapper that don’t get fed to the sharks and the crabs.

So the anglers complain that they only get to enjoy a 1- or 2-day red snapper season, at the same time that they’re killing most of their red snapper when that season is closed.  At the same time, they’re fighting to prevent NMFS from closing the season for all South Atlantic snapper-grouper for a few months each year, and so cutting back on the current, unconscionable waste.

In doing so, they also find themselves firmly impaled on the horns of a dilemma.  On one hand, they want to argue that the ocean is filled with red snapper, so that they can enjoy longer seasons and perhaps a bigger bag.  But on the other hand, they can’t admit that high red snapper abundance means that anglers can’t avoid catching—and inadvertently killing—loads of red snapper during the closed season, in numbers high enough to justify setting more than 90% of the annual catch limit aside to cover dead recreational discards.

They’re caught in a lose/lose situation, one that the Great South Atlantic Red Snapper Count won’t be very great at resolving, even if and when it is incorporated into the next stock assessment.  A count is the wrong tool for the problem at hand.

And that brings us up to today, when the results of what folks are calling “Great Amberjack Count” are being trumpeted in the outdoor media.

Once again, we’re looking at a situation where a coalition of industry and anglers’ rights groups prevailed on local congressmen—those political action committees are certainly useful things—to allocate $10 million to study the abundance of greater amberjack in the waters stretching from North Carolina to the Rio Grande.

The motivation remains the same, impeaching the stock assessments relied upon by federal fisheries managers, so anglers can put more dead fish on ice.  While that wasn’t much of an issue in the South Atlantic, where amberjack supply pretty well satisfies angler demand, an article that appeared in the July 25 edition of The Outdoor Wire noted that

“it is a completely different story in the Gulf of [Mexico].  Currently, no greater amberjack season has been set for 2026, and the previous seasons were set so that anglers would have something to catch when for-hire (charters) red snapper season is closed.  The [Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo], which is held on the third full weekend of July each year, hasn’t had an amberjack category in more than 15 years.”

Once again, we’re looking at a comprehensive study that was conducted by a big team of very competent and capable scientists; I recognize a lot of their names, and have spoken to a few of them over the years about different species.  I’m not going to get into the fine details of the entire, 600-page report, but its Executive Summary provided some relevant findings:

“The overall and regional estimates…were within the scale of the most recent stock assessments of Greater Amberjack.  For the South Atlantic, the estimate derived from underwater cameras was 3.08 million with a percent coefficient of variation [a measure of uncertainty]…of 35%.  The estimate derived from using acoustics was similar, 3.09 million, with a higher CV of 41.5 %.  For scale of comparison, the terminal year (2018) of the latest South Atlantic Greater Amberjack Stock Assessment was 2.64 million.  While a CV around the stock assessment estimate is not reported, annual estimates over the past 20 years of the stock assessment (1999-2018) ranged from 1.7 to 3.9 million age 1+ Greater Amberjack.”

So, the study does not conflict with the findings of the last stock assessment, with respect to amberjack in the South Atlantic.

When it comes to amberjack in the Gulf of Mexico, the Executive Summary informs us that

“Our point-estimate for the camera-only Gulf of [Mexico] population size is higher than that from the terminal year (2018) of the latest Gulf of [Mexico] Greater Amberjack Stock Assessment (4.34 million in our study vs. 1.39 million from SEDAR 39).  However, the CV from the camera-only estimate is quite large, at 46.4%...For comparison the last 20-year range for SEDAR 59 is 1.39 to 3.50 million…The acoustic estimate derived by this study for the Gulf of [Mexico] region was 1.45 million with a CV of 21%. 

The [principal investigators] recommend the video-based methodology for any comparisons.  Among the reasons for this choice is that the length frequency distributions can be derived.  These length frequencies indicated differences in size composition between the three major areas (W. Gulf, E. Gulf, and SA).”

The Executive Summary also included a warning.

“The [principal investigators] also express caution with any direct comparisons of our results to the stock assessment results.  We list the range of population size estimates derived from the stock assessment purely to inform the reader of the scale of our estimates compared to past management assumptions.  While there is some overlap—for example, camera-based fishery independent surveys are used in the stock assessment and used in our estimation—the methodology used in the stock assessment is fundamentally different than adopted in our study.  Further, our study is intended to be a point estimate in time (2023) and successful management requires estimating rates of exploitation on an annual basis…  [emphasis added]”

Predictably, the angling press failed to heed that warning, and began blasting out reader—and advertiser—pleasing headlines such as

“Study Finds Twice as Many Amberjack Than The Federal Authorities Reported,”

and

“Great Amberjack Count Estimates Far More AJs in the Gulf,”

which suggest that the results of the Great Amberjack Count and the Gulf of Mexico stock assessment are directly comparable, when the report makes it very clear that is not the case.

Hopefully, the data that the Count developed will not be rushed into the stock assessment as a result of that sort of hype.  Hopefully, it will instead be given all necessary consideration so that, like the data from the Great Red Snapper Count, it is only included into the stock assessments after thorough and appropriate scientific review.

The Great Amberjack Count, like the other counts described earlier, was certainly a good thing, because it finally gave top fisheries scientists enough funding to do meaningful and needed research into an economically and recreationally important, and heavily exploited, species.  That, in itself, is a sort of greatness.

But it and the other studies can only truly be great if they expand our understanding of, and improve the sustainability of, marine fish stocks.

Just putting more dead fish in anglers’ coolers doesn’t make them great at all.

 

 

MAKING SENSE OF MENHADEN MANAGEMENT

 

Menhaden management has been a hot issue in fisheries management over the past couple of years, and that’s probably not unexpected, as it’s hard to recall a time when some sort of menhaden controversy wasn’t on the table.

Back in the early 1970s, when I was just out of high school and fishing in the western end of Long Island Sound, the presence of the “bunker boats”—purse seiners from various operations that were eventually consolidated into the company that became Omega Protein—was outraging anglers because “they’re taking all the bait” and destroying lobster traps and other fixed gear, leading some folks to do things like sink engine blocks chained to grapnels, in the hope that they’d tangle and destroy any seines that got to close to the bottom of the Sound.

When I got involved in fisheries management at the national level, about 30 years ago, menhaden was still a hot issue.  Back then, it was all about transforming the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board and related bodies, which were then completely controlled by the menhaden industry, into independent scientific and management panels similar to those used for all of the other ASMFC-managed species.  Conservation and recreational fisheries groups joined together, put in a lot of work, and eventually achieved their goal in 2001, with the adoption of Amendment 1 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.

Since then, menhaden debates were largely about how many fish could be safely removed from the population without causing harm.

In 2006, as a purely precautionary measure, the Management Board adopted Addendum II to Amendment 1 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden, which capped the amount of menhaden that might be removed from the Chesapeake Bay.  The intent was to prevent localized depletion of the menhaden resource, even though localized depletion has never been formally documented in the Bay or anywhere else.  That so-called “Bay Cap” has been reduced in later management actions, the most recent being a reduction to 51,000 metric tons—less than half the original cap—in 2017, with the adoption of Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.

Such reductions were made even though localized depletion had still not been convincingly documented.

Amendment 3 also set the stage for the use of ecological reference points, which would allow menhaden managers to consider the species’ role as a forage fish, and manage it to accord with the needs of predators, particularly the striped bass, and not merely for single-species sustainability.

As one might suspect, all of those years of controversy and debate resulted in a lot of people getting emotionally invested in the menhaden issue, something that only got worse after 2008, when author H. Bruce Franklin wrote The Most Important Fish in the Sea, a well-written but perhaps not entirely accurate book about Atlantic menhaden, its ecological role, and the impacts of the menhaden fishery.  That volume captured the imagination of a surprising number of people, turning them into advocates for more restrictive menhaden management.

And the investment wasn’t merely emotional.  A lot of the big foundations that provide grants to various conservation groups were concerned about maintaining intact marine ecosystems, and part of that concern involved maintaining populations of forage fish, including menhaden, that were large enough to supply predators’ needs.  Those foundations were willing to fund menhaden advocacy initiatives, and the promise of at least semi-reliable funding inspired many conservation groups to keep menhaden management at the top of their agendas.  That, in turn, funded more than a few consultants who, over the course of a couple of decades, were able to pay their mortgages and feed their families, in large part from the money they generated from menhaden-related work.

Menhaden became what I call a “political fish,” which results in the management debates being largelyn driven by emotion and ideology rather than by dispassionate scientific analysis, a situation that makes any intelligent discussion of the issues more difficult to conduct.

Thirty years after I first got involved in the menhaden debate, some things—particularly, the fishery management plan—have changed, but some things remain very much the same.

People are still claiming that the menhaden reduction fleet is catching up all the baitfish.  Menhaden advocates still tend to sensationalize, and distort, the facts.  The reduction fishery continues to be demonized.  There are still debates over the size of the Chesapeake Bay cap.  And emotional, ideological arguments are still getting in the way of rational management action.

There is also one very big change, that just occurred over the past year.

The most recent menhaden stock assessment found that menhaden fecundity—the number of eggs produced, which is used as a proxy for spawning stock biomass—is substantially less than previously believed, and that the fishing mortality rate is substantially higher.  

Anecdotal evidence coming from fishermen all along the coast suggest that most of the menhaden they’re seeing are unusually small, perhaps one- or two-year-old fish.  Such truncation of the age/size structure is often a symptom of too many fish being removed from the population.

While the stock is neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing—yet—landings need to be substantially cut to get them back to the target level.

On the afternoon of August 5, the Atlantic Menhaden Management Board will meet for its summer meeting.  It’s not going to discuss a cut in menhaden landings—it’s saving that debate for October.  Instead, it is going to spend almost all of the meeting debating, perfecting, and hopefully approving a new Draft Addendum II to Amendment 3 of the Atlantic Menhaden Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Public Comment.

Draft Addendum II is all about managing the menhaden reduction fishery in Virginia’s section of the Chesapeake Bay, which are possibly the only inland waters on the Atlantic Coast where the reduction boats are still allowed to operate.

The proposed “Statement of the Problem” in the Draft Addendum provides a good idea of what the document hopes to address.

“The availability of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay may be affected by changes in total abundance, size distribution of the population, and timing of spatial distribution in the Bay, which can be caused by fishing pressure, environmental conditions, habitat sustainability and/or changing predator pressures on a limited spatial and temporal scale.  Such changes in menhaden availability may affect the species’ ability to fulfill its ecological and/or economic functions.  Recent observations of below average commercial fisheries landings and concerning population trends in several species that use menhaden as prey within Chesapeake Bay suggest that availability of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay may be changing due to one or more of the above drivers…  [emphasis added]”

So we know that there seem to be problems in the Chesapeake Bay, with respect to menhaden abundance and distribution, commercial menhaden landings, and perhaps menhaden availability to predators, but we also know that there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the existence and the causes of those issues.  Thus, the above statement uses a lot of hedging language—“may” appears three times and “can” appears once over the course of just three long sentences—without a single statement that uses words like “does,” “causes,” and “will”, which would clearly allege a relationship between menhaden and any of the problematic conditions.

The information just isn’t there.

Thus, the Draft Addendum also notes that

“there are currently not sufficient scientific data available to comprehensively characterize the abundance and distribution of menhaden throughout Chesapeake Bay and the influence of fishing pressure on menhaden.”

That puts the Management Board in a bind, because many members are reluctant to impose more restrictive management measures on the menhaden fishery when there isn’t clear scientific evidence suggesting that those measures are needed.

The Commonwealth of Virginia has recently agreed to fund a menhaden study that ought to provide some of the badly needed answers, but good research doesn’t happen overnight.  A very experienced fisheries manager, with an intimate knowledge of the Chesapeake Bay, recently told me that results of the research might not be published for five years or so.

Meanwhile, managers are effectively flying blind with respect to Bay-specific menhaden issues.

 

That being the case, an argument can certainly be made that managers should match high levels of uncertainty with high levels of precaution when adopting management measures.  It is far too easy to overlook a threat to the stock when the information on hand is ambiguous—if the relevant information exists at all.

The current 51,000 metric ton cap on the reduction fishery in the Chesapeake Bay is the prime example of the Management Board adopting a precautionary management measure in the face of uncertain and/or nonexistent data.

The Draft Addendum would perpetuate such precautionary approach, while addressing three intertwined issues.

The first of those is how to deal with the Bay Cap.  Currently, the Cap is arbitrarily set at 51,000 metric tons, and is not directly related to the overall annual catch limit; when the ACL was reduced by 20% last fall, the Bay Cap didn’t change.

Intuitively, that seems wrong. 

An initial, gut reaction would probably suggest that if the overall annual catch limit is cut, the Bay Cap should be cut by a similar percentage.  If fewer menhaden need to be removed from the ocean, it seems sensible to also remove fewer menhaden from the Chesapeake Bay.  The Draft Addendum reflects such concerns with a pair of options, saying,

“Therefore, this draft addendum considers a one-time reduction in the Bay Cap in consideration of recent or upcoming changes to the TAC and setting the Bay Cap as a proportion of the TAC so that it changes automatically with future changes to the TAC.  [emphasis added]”

To make ingsit clear, because the language is a little ambiguous, the Draft Addendum offers two different options.  One of those options would be a one-time change to the Cap, which would fall into a range somewhere between status quo and a 50% reduction. 

That doesn’t seem unreasonable.  If the Total Allowable Catch is reduced, because too many fish are being landed, it seems reasonable to reduce the Bay Cap, too, so too much of the overall harvest doesn’t take place in the relatively restricted waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

The problem with that sort of one-time reduction is that, if the Bay Cap needs to be reduced again, it will require at least another addendum, and close to a year of time, to get the job done.

To get around that problem, a second option would automatically tie changes in the Bay Cap to changes to the Total Allowable Catch.  The option isn’t as simple as just changing the TAC and the Cap by the same percentage, and there are a couple of permutations to the way the Bay Cap reduction might be achieved.  One, designated Sub-Option C1a-e, would link the change in the Bay Cap to a defined percentage of the overall TAC, within a limited range defined by a high of 27.3%, which represents the current relationship between the TAC and the Bay Cap, and a low value of 13.6%, which represents a 50% reduction in the proportion of overall menhaden landings that might come from the Chesapeake Bay.

While it might seem attractive to have a smaller percentage of the overall catch taken from the Chesapeake Bay, it’s important to note that this option addresses a change to the Bay Cap, not merely a reduction.  Unlike the one-time reduction described earlier, which can only cut the total amount of menhaden removed from the Bay by the reduction fishery, tying the Bay Cap to the TAC means that if the TAC is increased, the Bay Cap will increase, too.  If the TAC is increased enough, the Bay Cap could even exceed its current 51,000 metric tons.

The problem is that, until we know whether local environmental conditions require menhaden in the Chesapeake to be managed differently, and perhaps more conservatively, than the coastwide menhaden stock, matching coastwide increases with increases to the Bay Cap might prove counterproductive.

Sub-Option C2 a-e addresses that issue by discarding the percent-of-overall-TAC approach in favor of upper and lower limits on the Bay Cap.  Options range from the most conservative, which doesn’t allow the Cap to exceed the current 51,000 mt, with no lower limit to what the Bay Cap might be, to the least conservative, which would allow the Cap to increase to 87,216 metric tons, and wouldn’t allow it to decrease below 25,500 mt.

I suspect that all three of those broad options will remain in the Draft Addendum, so that the public can express their preferences, although the Management Board might winnow out a few of the possible choices to make the document a little easier for the public to understand.

In the end, when it comes time for the Management Board to pick one for the final version of Addendum II, I think that, for now, the one-time reduction is the right way to go.  In principle, I heartily agree with something recently published by the American Saltwater Guides Association:

“The Chesapeake Bay is not a scaled-down version of the ocean.  It is a distinct ecological system with its own patterns of localized depletion, its own forage demands from predators, and a long record of concentrated industrial harvest.  Tying the Bay Cap to the ocean quota removes the Board’s ability to manage the Bay independently and on its own scientific merits.  It treats a critical nursery and feeding area as just another line on a spreadsheet.”

Maybe in five years, when the research is done and conclusions are reached, we’ll find that the Chesapeake really is a “scaled-down version of the ocean,” that localized depletion still can’t be proven, and that, no special management measures are needed for the menhaden within the Chesapeake Bay..

Maybe we’ll find just the opposite, and learn that the Bay-specific measures are clearly required.

But until managers have clear scientific guidance on those issues, giving the Board the discretion to manage the Bay as an independent ecosystem will be the right way to go.

A separate option, designated Option 3.3, would, if adopted, require the Management Board to revisit the Bay Cap every three years, to ensure that it remains at an appropriate level.  That seems to make sense, and hopefully, the Management Board will keep it in the Draft Addendum and, eventually, in the final version of Addendum II.

Finally, the Draft Addendum asks whether the reduction fishery should be free to catch the entire Bay Cap in a relatively short period, should the fish be available, or whether the season should be broken down into three separate periods, each with its own quota.  The latter option is proposed, because the Management Board perceived a

“potential for a concentration of reduction fishery landings in a short time period, as seen in 2023 and 2024, when over 50% of the Bay reduction fishery landings were taken in a 6-week period in mid-summer.  When this occurs, it is possible that these higher-than-normal catch rates could affect the availability of menhaden to other fisheries or predators, which is what the Bay Cap was intended to prevent.  [emphasis added]”

Once again, because of a lack of hard information, the Draft Addendum has to use speculative language, because no one really knows whether concentrating menhaden landings in a relatively short period of time is doing any harm at all.  And once again, because of a lack of good data, a precautionary approach is probably justified.

It could be argued that the Plan Development Team made the seasonal quota options a little more complicated than it needed to, for along with simply dividing the season into trimesters, with each trimester quota amounting to one-third of the Cap, they also provided an option described as “Even Length and Uneven Harvest,” which kept the relatively uniform trimesters, but allocated 50% of the potential landings to the last third of the season, and another option described as “Uneven Length and Even Harvest,” which broke up the season into three periods, of 11 weeks, six weeks, and 11 weeks and five days, respectively, with one-third of the Bay Cap allocated to each one.

Those who would like to reduce the overall landings from the Chesapeake Bay might see some real virtue in Option B2, Even Length and Uneven Harvest, as limiting landings during each of the first two trimesters to 25% of the Bay Cap would probably force the reduction fleet into the ocean and out of the Bay earlier than would the other two options, and at least open up the possibility that the fleet would land something close to its overall TAC while participating in the ocean fishery, making it unnecessary to land the full 50% of the Bay Cap at the tail end of the season, when reduction fishing activity is typically at its lowest point of the year.

While that outcome may be wishful thinking, it still might make Option B2 the frontrunner once the public comment period begins.

On the other hand, there seems to be little virtue in Option B3, Uneven Length and Even Harvest, as one of the seeming motivations for proposing seasonal quotas was the fact that “over 50% of the Bay reduction fishery landings were taken in a 6-week period in mid-summer” in 2023 and 2024, and one of the things that Option B3 does is create a 6-week-long mid-summer season when 33% of the landings would be concentrated.  While 33% is still smaller than “over 50%,” concentrating one-third of the landings in a short 6-week season, and allowing for the real possibility of quota overages if the fish are readily available, Option B3 seems to risk perpetuating a problem the seasonal quotas were supposed to solve.

And as I noted, quota overages are always a real possibility, particularly in large-scale fisheries that can sometimes encounter a lot of menhaden in a relatively short time, and landings reports lag what’s actually happening on the water.

Thus, the Draft Addendum needs to address the issue of quota overages and underages, and the issue of paybacks, for as it observes,

“Without any overage payback provision, there would be little incentive for industry to abide by their in-year quota periods.”

But the Draft Addendum also observes that,

“Without any underage rollover provision, the quota periods may inhibit industry’s ability to harvest the Bay Cap.”

That makes it seem as if paybacks and rollovers are just two different sides of the same coin.  I tend to disagree about that, because a quota—or a Bay Capt—is just what its name suggests, a hard cap that may not be exceeded without consequences.  It is an absolute cap on harvest, not a target that must be achieved. 

Moreover, while there is only one reason why a quota might be exceeded—the industry killed too many fish—there can be many reasons why an underage occurred, including bad weather, environmental conditions keeping menhaden out of the Bay and, most importantly, lowered overall abundance.  And if the latter case proves to be true, allowing the industry to roll over underages into another period, so it can take more fish from a declining biomass, is probably the worst thing to do.

All things considered, the proposal deemed Option A, “No payback for quota period overages with rollover of unused quota within a fishing year,” seems like a particularly bad idea.  The Draft Addendum provides the following rationale:

“There would be no payback for exceeding the allocation of a quota period unless it causes the Bay Cap to be exceeded.  An overage of the total Bay Cap would be deducted from the following year’s Bay Cap before it is allocated into the quota periods.  Any underage of Quota Period 1 or 2 can be used in any subsequent quota period within the year.”

Adopting that option would be perfectly pointless, as it would do nothing to solve the problem that the seasonal quotas were supposed to solve.  Without paybacks for exceeding the seasonal quotas, there would be nothing to stop the industry from catching the majority of the Bay Cap within a 6-week—or shorter—period, and creating exactly those problems that the seasonal quotas were intended to prevent.

I suspect that Option A is intended to be the status quo option for the paybacks issue, even if it is not listed as such, and so will be retained in the Draft Addendum.  But it is nonetheless a very bad idea, and it would be unfortunate if it ended up being the option chosen for the final version of Addendum II.

Unfortunately, underage rollovers seem to be baked into all of the other options, which fortunately also require paybacks of any seasonal overages.  While the underages, unlike paybacks, never roll over into the next fishing year, they could lead to intense fishing effort, during the last one or two trimesters, on what might prove to be an unexpectedly low concentration of fish. 

That’s not the best outcome, but it certainly isn’t a deal-killer.  On balance, Draft Addendum II, as it currently stands, contains reasonable and worthwhile provisions that would promote the sort of precautionary management approach that is appropriate until such time as the research is done and more data-based solutions can be considered.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Draft Addendum will be approved for public comment next month.

It should be approved, and I believe that the odds favor approval, probably in a form not too different from the current draft.  But I have been involved in menhaden management for far too long, and won’t be surprised if something else happens.

It’s probably predictable that the menhaden reduction industry will object to at least some of the Draft Addendum’s provisions, arguing that the Bay Cap has no scientific support, that reducing the Cap is thus inappropriate and punitive, etc.  Depending on how the various jurisdictions line up—and these days, when the federal agencies are taking a hard stance against conservation measures, that lineup has changed from what it has traditionally been—it is far from impossible that some coalition will unexpectedly form and send the Draft Addendum back to the Plan Development Team for further review.

And it’s probably also predictable that the folks who hang out at the other end of the menhaden circus—the die-hard “most important fish in the sea” crowd, known for their emotional diatribes in all forms of media—are going to say that the Draft Addendum doesn’t go far enough, and might start even claiming, as they have before, that

“THE US FISHERIES CRISIS IS REAL,”

whining about supposedly

“COLLAPSING OCEAN FOOD SYSTEMS”

and

“DEVASTATING COASTAL ECONOMIES,

as they do their best to convince other Management Board members to send the Draft Addendum back to the Plan Development Team, hoping to add additional restrictions on the reduction fleet.

It would be more than a little ironic if the efforts of the menhaden reduction fleet and those vehemently opposed to the menhaden reduction fishery inadvertently combined to stall the progress of the Draft Addendum, but given how ephemeral the alliances have been on the Management Board, such an outcome is not at all unlikely.

But hopefully, it will not happen.

Hopefully, the Draft Addendum will be released for public comment, and provide an opportunity for additional precautionary measures being applied to the menhaden fishery in the Chesapeake Bay.

But even if things work out that way, folks ought to understand that Amendment II is only a sideshow in the bigger picture of menhaden management.

While it would be nice to see a precautionary management approach prevail in the Chesapeake Bay, the real fight will come in October, when the Management Board sets the Total Allowable Catch for the 2027, 2028, and 2029 fishing seasons.  For if the Management Board fails to make meaningful cuts to menhaden harvest, hopefully constraining menhaden landings to or below target levels by 2029, the sustainability of the Atlantic menhaden stock, including the fish that might sojourn in Chesapeake Bay, will be placed in substantial peril.

And that’s something that Draft Addendum II just can’t fix on its own.

 

 

 

 

SPORT FISHING: THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...

 

I recently saw an article in the New York Post (hardly a stellar reference, but it came up in a Google alert) which was headlined “Wall Street finance bros have found their newest flex—but it’s dividing one of the Hampton’s oldest communities.”  As I read it, I was forced to think back on the history and trajectory of offshore sport fishing, and on how much things change, while remaining, in some ways, the same.

The article opened with the words,

“A 300-pound tuna fish doesn’t care how much your house costs.  And on the ocean, there are no VIP tables or name-dropping.

“As the offshore tuna season reaches its peak at Montauk, Long Island, a wave of Wall Street thrill-seekers, million-dollar sportfishing boats and first-time charter anglers are pouring into one of the East Coast’s oldest fishing communities.

“For generations, the only people who fished tuna were the ones whose lives revolved around the water.

“Now these veteran anglers are begrudgingly sharing the beloved recreational sport of deep-water fishing for hard-fighting, giant and prized tuna fish with city slickers who only recently learned about the big game pursuit thanks to social media and TV.”

There are a lot of things wrong with that paragraph, beginning with the notion that Montauk is “one of the East Coast’s oldest fishing communities.”  While some fishing always took place there, the Montauk/Easthampton area was dominated by agriculture, particularly cattle ranches, through much of its early history.  It’s remote location made it difficult to transport fish to market until 1895, when a new branch of the Long Island Rail Road connected the village to New York City, and its coastline provided dubious shelter for vessels until 1926, when real estate developer Carl G. Fisher, who had purchased 10,000 acres of Montauk land, blasted through the thin strip of coastline that separated what was then freshwater Lake Montauk from Block Island Sound, and created the harbor that now shelters Montauk’s fishing fleet.

Compared to ports in New England—the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, was exporting fish to Europe and the West Indies well before the Revolutionary War—that makes Montauk a relative newcomer as far as fishing communities go.

But where the New York Post piece really goes off the rails is when it says that “for generations, the only people who fished tuna were those whose lives revolved around the water,” and its suggestion that “the beloved recreational sport of deep-water fishing for hard-fighting, giant and prized tuna fish” being enjoyed by “city slickers” is something new.

In fact, offshore sport fishing has always been the pursuit of well-heeled individuals who could afford the price of ocean-capable boats, hired captains and crews, and the travel needed to get where the fish are.  It has only been in relatively recent times—say, the last 50 years or so—that offshore fishing became readily accessible to people of more modest means, as advances in boat and engine technology allowed manufacturers to build less expensive, outboard-powered boats that were nonetheless capable of carrying fishermen to productive deep waters.

A recent article in Marlin magazine, which described the role United States anglers played in developing the sport of big-game fishing, observed that

“The roots of modern big-game fishing run straight back to Catalina Island [California] in the early 1900s…

“Rod and reel designs improved rapidly.  Captains learned how to handle their boats around a hooked fish.  Anglers figured out through hard experience what worked and what didn’t—and crucially, they wrote it down.  Catches were weighed, measured, photographed, and documented.  What could have been forgotten became the foundation for something lasting.  Catalina Island is home to the Avalon Tuna Club, one of the oldest and most influential institutions in the sport.

“Zane Gray [a California dentist who made his fortune writing pulp novels about the American West], an active member of the Avalon Tuna Club and once served as vice president, was the person who related that foundation to a wider audience.  His vivid account of bluefin battles reached readers throughout the country who had never been near salt water, and they made the sport feel worth aspiring to.  Grey didn’t just write about catching fish; he captured the physicality of it, the hourslong battles against powerful animals, the exhaustion, the exhilaration.  He made anglers look like athletes, which, honestly, they were.”

 At the birth of the offshore sport, wealthy anglers, inspired by writing in the print media of the day, became interested in fishing for tuna and other offshore species.  No, they weren’t necessarily “finance bros,” although some probably did have Wall Street connections, and they learned about fishing for bluefin by reading about it, rather than by viewing “social media and TV”.  But, more than a century ago, there were already “city slickers” entering the fishery; the new anglers described in the Post article were merely new pilgrims following a trail first laid down many decades ago.

Offshore fishing came to Montauk soon after Montauk Lake was opened up to the sea, with the Montauk Yacht Club being built soon after.  Even before the Second World War, wealthy angler-authors such as S. Kip Farrington, who entered his family’s stock brokerage firm at the age of 16, and Van Campen Heilner, born into a family made wealthy by coal mines, fished Montauk waters.

The “finance bros” have been catching tuna at Montauk for a very long time.

But what they did with those tuna—and the other fish that they caught—wasn’t completely clear.

Some of them might have ended up in the Yacht Club’s kitchen, although giant bluefin weren’t considered good eating back then, and might just as well have ended up in a landfill or dumped out at sea after being weighed and taken down from the scales.  It’s also quite likely that a lot of fish ended up with the boats’ crews, who could have kept them for personal consumption, or sold them for whatever the market might pay.  The historical record isn’t too clear about that.

But one thing that was pretty clear was that the anglers didn’t feel the need to sell fish for their own account; they were already quite wealthy, and certainly didn’t have to sell fish for whatever pennies they might bring.

That has changed since the old days, for today, even the folks in the “million-dollar sportfishing boats” mentioned by the Post will take fish to market, for whatever value they might bring.  That was mentioned in the Post article, when it noted that

“’A lot of these guys are millionaires, and they come out and catch fish,” Montauk-based commercial fish dealer Bryan Gosman, 53, told The Post.

“Among longtime commercial fishermen, Gosman said there’s an unspoken understanding: the new sportfishing boom has changed the culture.

“’Commercial guys get irritated because it does affect the market of fish.  They think sportfishing guys don’t take good care of the fish; it becomes performative,’ he added.  ‘The picture is more important.’

“’They’re multi-millionaires.  The $4,000 check they get for a fish doesn’t even matter.’

“The New York fishing market as a whole is valued at around $42 million, and a single top-quality 1,000 pound tuna can fetch fishermen up to $10,000.  An influx of new era banker fishermen who aren’t interested in quality or profit could significant [sic] dent longtime family businesses, for whom this is their only income stream.”

Such blurring of the lines between commercial and recreational fishermen just wasn’t something that happened in the early days of offshore sport fishing.

Another big difference is that, as offshore game fishing became more popular, the pioneers tried to make it into a legitimate sport, in which anglers competed on a more-or-less even basis.  As the Marlin article noted,

“As the sport grew, so did the ambition—and the chaos.  Without standardized rules, the concept of a fishing record became increasingly meaningless.  Anglers were using heavier lines and bigger reels, and making claims that couldn’t be verified or fairly compared.  The achievements were real, but the framework to verify them didn’t exist yet.

“That changed in 1939 when Michael Lerner founded the International Game Fish Association (IGFA).  His goal wasn’t to control the sport; it was to protect what achievement in the sport actually meant…If the rules were the same everywhere, then the only variable that mattered was the skill of the angler.

“What the IGFA gave fishermen was something more valuable than a record book.  When you held an IGFA record, you knew exactly what it took to earn it, and so did everyone else.  Over time, the IGFA evolved far beyond a regulatory body.  It became the global conscience of sport fishing, a persistent reminder that how you catch a fish is just as important as having caught it at all.  [emphasis added]”

Under IGFA rules, an angler must fight the fish from the hookup until it is leadered alongside the boat; a catch isn’t deemed legitimate if someone hooks the fish and then hands off the rod, and no one may touch the rod, reel, or line at any time during the fight.  If the rod is resting in a rod holder when a fish hits, it must be immediately removed; fighting a fish with the rod still in the holder is considered taboo.  Fish may not be harpooned, or shot, or mutilated by sharks or the boat’s propellers and still be deemed a legitimate catch.  And electric reels may not be employed.

There are other rules, too, all designed to make the battle between man and fish something approaching a fair fight, and making it easier to gauge anglers’ achievements.

That, too, is something that makes this modern era different from what went before.  While the IGFA’s rules still govern world records, and are used as the standard of conduct in many, probably most, major fishing tournaments, they are more and more ignored by the new generation of offshore anglers.

In the bluefin tuna fishery, fighting a big fish from a rod still stuck in a holder—effectively making the fish fight the boat, not the angler, which was something formerly done only by commercial fishermen—has become standard operating procedure for many anglers.  One charter boat captain even has a video describing the process.

“…I constantly wanna [sic] be pulling that fish towards the boat because we don’t take the rod out of the rod holder so that’s why I’m gonna keep the [boat in] gear and you guys shouldn’t either because you’re gonna be using at least 130 130 [sic] pounds Spectra or braided line if you will.  You guys are gonna be using at least that much because there’s no reason to fish ‘em any less.  Then, if you decide that you need to hold the pole cuz [sic] it’s gonna make you a better person, good luck with that.  I hope that everything works out fine because you’re gonna be using thirty to forty pounds of drag and you’re gonna be holding the pole.  Use your boat it’s way easier.  It’s all about holding the fish up by the tail.  It’s not about the battle.  Nobody cares that it took you 3 hours and but if you’re a he man and you need to get in there and battle with the fish so you’re sore for the rest of the week.  Go right ahead and put a harness on and fight that sucker.  The way we do it, we keep the rod in the gunnel…  [emphasis added]”

Basically, that captain is doing is doing his best to take the “sport” out of sportfishing, taking a sport that, at it’s core, is all “about the battle” and turning it into an exercise in which the only thing that matters is having a dead fish in the cockpit and holding up the tail for what will presumably be photos to be shared across social media platforms.  It’s kind of equivalent to starting a marathon, then after joggoing for 50 yards or a little more, taking a cab to the finish line before declaring that you “ran” the race.

Such thinking makes a mockery out of Ernest Hemingway’s famous words, describing a fight with a bluefin tuna:

“It is a back-sickening, sinew-straining, man-sized job even with a rod that looks like a hoe handle.  But if you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight, fight him man against fish until your muscles are nauseated with the unending strain, and finally bring him up alongside the boat, green-blue and silver in the lazy ocean, you will be purified and able to enter unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods, and they will make you welcome.”

It’s hard to see how letting the boat fight the fish and just holding it up by the tail for photos might seem rewarding.

And, by the way, using “thirty to forty pounds of drag” while fighting a fish is not a big deal, despite that captain’s comments.  I turn 72 in a couple of weeks, and I still use 27 pounds of drag on my 80-pound standups, and sincerely hope that when I head out tomorrow morning, I’ll find a big thresher shark—maybe something in the 300-400 pound range—that will drag me around the cockpit for a couple of hours while I’m harnessed to the rod getting some of my favorite kind of exercise.  (It’s not impossible that I might even find a nice bluefin, though that’s a lot less likely.)

But forty pounds of drag, for an angler fighting a bluefin from a chair, with a good footrest and a bucket harness, is just no big deal.

Yet recent years have seen many anglers enter a degraded “sport” where rods never leave their holders, fish are harpooned, and anglers think nothing of handing off the rod when they get a little tired, well before their back has been sickened, their sinews strained, or their muscles nauseated by what should be the sheer joy of the fight.

When the only point of the exercise is putting a dead fish in the boat, and putting photos up on the Internet, the essence of sport fishing is lost, as the fish becomes not a respected, if unwilling, opponent, but merely an object in a self-promotion campaign.

Yet some people still feel the sport’s original attraction.  As the Post reported,

“’Tuna fishing is oddly addicting,’ one Hampton Bays-based fisherman told The Post.  That’s why some of those Wall Street guys get a taste for it, and they’re like, ‘This is so awesome.’’

“’You get out there for like a banker guy who works in New York City, and you get offshore, and you see 40 whales feeding with their mouths open, it’s like National Geographic.’”

“’I’ve seen guys get hooked on this sport in one trip,  They caught their first 150 pound tuna, and they were all in, even so far as going to buy a boat,’ veteran offshore angler Nick Carro told The Post.”

Some things do remain the same.

Bluefin tuna still swim off Montauk’s shores, and the possibility of fishing for, and perhaps even catching, one of those great fish is still being communicated to the public, even if electronic media has largely replaced the traditional paper and ink.  Although the fish are now more accessible to the public than they were when Montauk Inlet was new, and the fishery is no longer the exclusive province of millionaires, offshore fishing is still the kind of expensive pastime that has always attracted a disproportionate number of wealthy adherents; “finance bros” have been in the fishery since its very first days.

And when an angler hooks up, whether that angler is a carpenter, a lawyer, or a hedge fund manager, those bluefin will still pull hard, and provide the same mental and physical challenges that they did a century ago.

Assuming, of course, that the angler is willing to accept the challenge of fighting a big fish one-on-one, with the rod out of the holder and no harpoon on board.

The fact that many of today’s anglers are not is, perhaps, the biggest difference between then and now.

And the most unfortunate.

Because if an angler seeks sport, how you catch a fish is just as important as having caught it at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A NEW, LOOMING THREAT TO MID-ATLANTIC FISHERIES

 

Mid-Atlantic fisheries have long faced the same sort of threats that faced fisheries elsewhere on the coast.

The possibility of overfishing is always there.  A warming ocean forces fish stocks farther north.  Forage fish might become less available.  Dams deny diadromous fish populations access to critical upstream habitat.  Managers fail to rebuild depleted stocks.

But while all of those threats are real, scientists already understand their impacts, and all are, at least in theory, subject to remediation by properly focused regulations or, at worst, accommodation, by recognizing the reality of things like shifting stocks, and adapting fisheries to best suit the new normal.

Yet there is a potential new threat looming off the Virginia coast that could cause large-scale disruption to the ocean floor, with yet-unknown impacts on the wide variety of fish species that inhabit the bottom, and perhaps the entire water column, between the state-federal border and the edge of the continental shelf.

On November 7, 2025, a company called Odyssey Marine Exploration filed a Lease Sale Request with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.  According to the company’s website,

“The proposed [lease] area, located within the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) off the Mid-Atlantic coast, is prospective for heavy mineral sands containing titanium, zirconium, and rare earth elements, with beneficial sand co-products that can support beach replenishment and coastal resilience projects…

“If future environmental reviews, regulatory approvals, and project evaluations support commercial recovery, operations could utilize shallow-water dredging techniques that are already widely used for navigation, beach nourishment, and coastal resilience projects.”

What the company website didn’t point out is that the potential scale of the proposed mining project would dwarf a mere channel dredging or beach replenishment operation.

The Request for Information and Interest published by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management describes the potential lease area as

“located between three and 63.5 miles offshore of the Delmarva Peninsula seaward of Accomack and Northampton counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia and lies entirely on the [Outer Continental Shelf] of the United States.  This area is comprised of approximately 1,769,196 acres (2,764 square miles) with an approximate water depth of 30-410 feet (8-125 meters).”

That’s a lot of fish habitat that could be impacted, and while the company tries to assure the public that

“The design of project work plans will prioritize environmental responsibility and, if a lease is granted, would align with BOEM’s review framework, which is conducted in accordance with applicable federal laws—including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act—and places environmental stewardship and cultural preservation at the forefront of the process,”

one must remember that, just about a year ago, the Trump administration began taking action to gut key provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, and earlier this month changed a key interpretation of the Endangered Species Act, so that damaging critical habitat for an endangered species is no longer considered doing “harm” to the species in question.

Thus, Odyssey’s assurances in that regard offer little real comfort.

And one of the big problems with the proposed operation is that no one is quite sure what sort of harm might ensue.

Becca Loomis, a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, observed that

“It’s essentially a brand new industry globally, so it’s unproven.  We don’t entirely understand what the risks are, and that makes it more concerning.”

She added,

“Heavy mineral sand mining involves dredging huge amounts of sand from the seafloor, and then processing that sand to extract the minerals.  Essentially, you’re pulling up huge, huge amounts of seafloor sediments.”

Megan Huynh, who leads the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Wetlands and Coast Program, stated that shallow seabed mining

“directly destroys all the physical habitat on the seafloor,”

and will also stir up huge clouds of sediment that could also lead to ecosystem disruptions.

And that can be problematic, because there is a lot of life living in, on, and above the proposed leasing site.

The National Marine Fisheries Service tells us that

“Summer flounder spawn in the fall and early winter when they migrate offshore,”

a migration that would take them right through the proposed lease area.  In addition,

“Spawning peaks in October and November when water temperatures change and autumn plankton is most productive.  The combination of these elements improve the chance of survival for larval summer flounder.”

How will vast sediment clouds impact the spawn, larval survival, and the presence of plankton that the larvae need to survive?

NMFS also tells us that

“Black sea bass…migrate offshore and south in the fall, returning inshore to coastal areas and bays in the spring,”

presumably crossing through, and wintering in, the proposed lease area off Virginia.  And those sea bass

“eat whatever prey is available, but they especially like crabs, shrimp, worms, small fish, and clams,”

prey that might become hard to find when a dredge “destroys all the physical habitat on the seafloor.”

And it’s not only bottom fish that could be affected.

Female bluefish realease their eggs in the open ocean; larvae develop into juveniles over the continental shelf—again, in the proposed lease area—before the juveniles move inshore and spend their first spring in coastal bays, estuaries, and sounds.  In the case of one of their preferred prey species, Atlantic menhaden, there are

“major spawning areas from New Jersey to the Carolinas.  The majority of spawning primarily occurs offshore (20-30 miles) during winter.  Buoyant eggs hatch at sea, and are carried into estuarine nursery areas by ocean currents,”

meaning that menhaden spawning will take place in the proposed lease area as well.  How either the bluefish or menhaden spawns might be affected by the dredging activity, and the huge sediment plumes that it would produce, is impossible to know.

And then there are striped bass.  The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission tells us that

“Important wintering grounds for the mixed stocks are located from offshore New Jersey to North Carolina.”

The 2018 benchmark striped bass stock assessment noted that

“Fishery-independent data collected by North Carolina DMF, ASMFC, and USFWS…suggest striped bass distribution on their overwintering grounds during December through February has changed significantly since the mid-2000s.  The migratory portion of the stocks has been well offshore in the EEZ (>3 miles), requiring travel as far as 25 [nautical miles] offshore of Chesapeake Bay to find fish to tag.”

That would place the center of winter striped bass abundance well within the proposed lease area, and raise questions about how those striped bass, as well as the baitfish they depend on to survive the winter and keep them in condition to spawn in the spring, would be affected by dredging activity, the resulting sediment plume, and the destruction of “all the physical habitat on the sea floor.”

Other species, ranging from weakfish to bluefin tuna, might also be affected by the dredging activities, yet the impacts on fish stocks do not seem to be a major administration concern.  Although the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has issued a Request for Information and Interest, which can be found at https://www.regulations.gov/document/BOEM-2026-0100-0001 and is claims to be seeking

“information and comments from Federally Recognized Indian Tribes, Federal agencies, state and local governments, environmental and other public interest organizations, the marine mineral mining and dredging industries, other interested organizations and entities, and the public,”

through the comment deadline of July 23, it is virtually certain that the leasing process will move forward, even if it meets substantial public opposition.  While it is important for those opposed to the proposed leasing activities to build as strong an administrative record as possible in support of their position, the plain truth is that the Trump administration is dedicated to ocean floor mining, and is unlikely to be dissuaded by anything less than a court order.

On April 24, 2025, the president issued Executive Order 14285, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” which declared, among other things, that

“Our Nation must take immediate action to accelerate the responsible development of seabed mineral resources, quantify the Nation’s endowment of seabed minerals, reinvigorate American leadership in associated extraction and processing technologies, and ensure secure supply chains for our defense, infrastructure, and energy sectors.”

The executive order also expresses a policy of

“rapidly developing domestic capabilities for the exploration, characterization, collection, and processing of seabed mineral resources through streamlined permitting without compromising environmental and transparency standards,”

and directs the Secretary of the Interior to

“establish an expedited process for reviewing and approving permits for prospecting and granting leases for exploration, development, and production of seabed mineral resources within the United States Outer Continental Shelf…The expedited process, consistent with applicable law, should ensure efficiency, predictability, and competitiveness for American companies.”

So the fix is definitely in, and the odds stacked impossibly high against those who would advise a go-slow approach to shallow seabed mining, in order to better assess its risks to marine ecosystems.

Unless somehow slowed by the Commonwealth of Virginia, by Congress, or by the courts, it is highly likely that the leasing process will move forward and, assuming that minerals are present and sufficiently abundant to ensure profitable extraction, that the Trump administration will authorize mining operations—not only by Odyssey, but by any other company willing to bid on a lease—before it leaves office in January 2029.

Should seabed mining begin, those companies will reap the benefits.

Our fish, our fisheries, our fishermen, and the marine environment as a whole, will bear the costs.