Chesapeake Bay Menhaden Gets Another Delay

For nearly two decades, the Chesapeake Bay has been waiting for a real answer to one of its most pressing ecological questions: how many menhaden can be removed from its waters before the damage becomes irreversible? That answer is still not coming — at least not yet.

At its May 5 meeting, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) Menhaden Management Board declined to advance Draft Addendum II — a document outlining possible reforms to Bay menhaden harvest limits — into a public comment period. Instead, the Board voted to form a work group to further revise the document ahead of its August meeting.

It is the latest in a long series of delays for a fishery that has been contentious for well over a century.

Menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus) have been commercially harvested along the Atlantic coast since the mid-1800s, when farmers first discovered their value as fertilizer. By the early 20th century, industrial-scale “reduction” fisheries — which grind menhaden into fish oil and fish meal for use in animal feed and dietary supplements — had grown into a major East Coast industry, with processing plants stretching from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico.

The industry has always attracted controversy. Menhaden are a foundational forage fish: filter feeders that convert plankton into biomass and serve as the primary food source for striped bass, bluefish, weakfish, osprey, humpback whales, and dozens of other species. Their role in the ecosystem is so central that conservation author H. Bruce Franklin titled his 2007 book on the species The Most Important Fish in the Sea.

By the latter half of the 20th century, the coastwide menhaden population had declined significantly. Concern mounted throughout the 1990s and 2000s, particularly among Chesapeake Bay watermen and anglers who believed industrial reduction fishing — most of it concentrated in the Bay — was stripping the ecosystem of a critical food source.

The Cap That Was Supposed to Be Temporary

In 2006, the ASMFC responded to those concerns by imposing a cap on the amount of menhaden that reduction vessels could harvest from Chesapeake Bay, set at approximately 112 million pounds per year. Crucially, the cap was designed as a precautionary, temporary measure — a stopgap while scientists worked to determine what a truly sustainable harvest level should look like.

That research never produced a definitive answer. The cap, intended as a placeholder, became permanent by default. Almost 20 years later, it remains essentially unchanged, and the scientific and management framework that was supposed to follow it still hasn’t materialized.

In the meantime, the reduction industry’s presence in the Bay has drawn increasing scrutiny. Charter captains, commercial fishermen, and conservationists have argued that concentrated industrial harvesting — particularly during the summer months when menhaden schools are most visible and accessible — disrupts predator feeding patterns and undermines efforts to rebuild depleted species like striped bass.

What Draft Addendum II Proposes

Draft Addendum II represents the ASMFC’s most concrete recent effort to revisit that 2006 cap. The document presents two categories of potential reform.

The first addresses the cap itself, offering options to reduce it by 10, 20, 30, or 50 percent — or to maintain the status quo. Any reduction would increase the amount of menhaden left in the Bay to support predators and the broader food web.

The second category introduces seasonal quota periods, which would divide the annual harvest allowance into time-based segments rather than permitting the entire cap to be harvested as quickly as possible at the start of the season. The goal is to ensure menhaden remain available throughout the fishing season for the species — and industries — that depend on them.

What Comes Next

The newly formed work group will revisit the addendum’s language, with a focus on clarifying options around how potential overharvest or underharvest within individual quota periods would be handled. The Board is expected to take up the revised document at the ASMFC’s August meeting, with a public comment period potentially opening in the fall.

The coastwide menhaden stock is not currently considered overfished, and the reduction industry — now largely consolidated under a single major company, Omega Protein — maintains that current harvest levels are sustainable. But conservation advocates and many scientists argue that coastwide stock health is a poor proxy for the Bay-specific impacts of concentrated industrial fishing, particularly given the Chesapeake’s outsized role as a nursery for Atlantic menhaden and the predators that feed on them.

The public comment period, when it opens, will be the primary opportunity for anglers, watermen, conservationists, and coastal communities to weigh in. After 20 years of waiting for the science to catch up with the policy, that window may be the most important one yet.

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Wayne Creed

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