A small ocean fish with silvery skin and oily flesh has retaken center stage in a long-running debate over fishing and ecosystem health in two of the nation’s most productive estuaries: the Chesapeake Bay and Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
Sport fishermen and environmentalists are again demanding that regulators do more to protect menhaden (pronounced men-HAY-den), a fish once so abundant it helped sustain entire ocean food chains — gobbled up by everything from Atlantic striped bass to Gulf of Mexico red drum.
Increasingly, however, advocates say menhaden are showing signs of stress in their core habitats, a condition some attribute to commercial fishing pressure in the lower Chesapeake Bay and along Louisiana’s brackish coast. A decline of menhaden in either region would mean more than another lost species for commercial and recreational fishermen. As with other forage fish like herring and shad, menhaden are central to the greater ocean ecosystem, providing sustenance for higher-order fish that fetch premium prices at seafood counters and restaurants.
The diminutive species was christened “the most important fish in the sea” by Rutgers University historian H. Bruce Franklin in a 2007 book of the same name, a status it still claims two decades later.
“Menhaden is the most important fish for a reason,” said Rad Trascher, executive director of the Louisiana chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association, which wants tighter regulations of commercial menhaden fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The entire Gulf fishery depends on it sticking around,” Trascher added. “If it goes, so does every other species that eats it.”
The Menhaden Fisheries Coalition, which represents commercial fishing on both coasts, holds that conservationists’ claims are overblown and based on selective science.
Any deep cut to Atlantic menhaden catch limits would be “wholly unjustified,” the group said in a recent release. In Louisiana, industry representatives say fishermen have taken significant steps to reduce risk to menhaden in near-shore habitat areas, including avoiding areas where juvenile fish are abundant.
Every year, between 400,000 and 600,000 metric tons of menhaden are netted and fed to U.S. fish mills, according to experts.
In fact, menhaden bears little resemblance to a fish after it has been cooked, pressed and dried to separate omega-3-rich fish oils from its flesh. The oils are primary ingredients in high-protein animal feed, and since the 1990s have found a growing market as dietary supplements. What remains — head, trunk, fins and bones — is ground into meal, which is also used for animal feed and as farm fertilizer.
Another 15 to 30 percent is sold as bait for lobster and crab fishermen, according to industry statistics, while 2 percent goes to sportfishermen to hook striped bass, bluefish, snapper, red drum, cobia and even sharks.
One fish, two coasts
Opinions differ widely about the state of the menhaden, and studies have shown mixed results. The fish are not overfished on either coast, according to official stock assessments.
But population dynamics are shifting, particularly in estuarine areas where the juvenile menhaden perform critical ecosystem functions. Coastal conservation groups fear those changes bode poorly for the species’ future.
Most menhaden are harvested using purse seining nets that are dropped by commercial vessels to encircle swirling mega-schools of menhaden, sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands of fish.
As has been the case for decades, the very mention of menhaden — also known as “bunker” and “pogie” — can stir strong opinions in marinas and working wharfs from the Virginia Tidewater to Chandeleur Sound at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The latest menhaden flare-ups are fueled by two recent and unrelated regulatory actions — one by the state of Louisiana and the other by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the multistate regulatory body that oversees menhaden management from Maine to Florida.
In both places, sportfishing and environmental groups argue that regulators need to do more to protect menhaden and its habitat, not only for the fish but for other predator species that eat it, like sportfish and shorebirds.
The industry — consisting of just a handful of processing plants and commercial vessel owners on both coasts — counters that its annual catches are nowhere near the threshold of overfishing, something past NOAA surveys have confirmed. The fisheries along the Atlantic and in the Gulf netted more than a half-million metric tons of fish in 2024, according to federal and industry estimates.
Fishing by the “reduction fishery” industry is the largest pressure on the species, environmentalists argue, including accidental kills from what are known as “net bursts,” when the size of a catch exceeds a seining net’s ability to hold the fish.
Environmentalists say such accidents happen far too often despite industry’s claims to the contrary.
In Louisiana, three separate net burst incidents in September 2023 resulted in the deaths of about 900,000 fish. Two years earlier, a reduction vessel near Hampton Roads, Virginia, released about 400,000 menhaden after a net became too heavy, resulting in a massive fish kill.
New regulations
The Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission on Nov. 6 passed a “notice of intent” to change a buffer rule that previously required commercial vessels to stay at least half-mile from designated menhaden areas along the coast.
The new rule would allow menhaden fishing within a quarter-mile in some areas, while expanding the buffer in other areas. The rule change must undergo public review and comment before it can be finalized, according to the commission.
Industry groups successfully argued that vessels can fish within a quarter-mile of the coastline without compromising the fish’s viability or surrounding ecosystem, including nutritional needs for sportfish like red drum and speckled trout. Environmental groups warned the loss of any buffer area would further erode the menhaden’s core habitat.
Chris Macaluso, director of fisheries for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said the reconfiguring of buffer zones that were agreed to just last year “undermines public trust in our state’s ability to conservatively manage its fisheries.”
The Louisiana Commercial Fishing Coalition, which represents menhaden fishermen and processors, counter-argued that the change will improve the balance between “protecting land and water while sustaining the people who rely on them.”
Only days before, regulators on the Atlantic Coast were trying to strike their own bargain between environmental organizations and the menhaden industry by approving a 20 percent reduction in allowable catch along the entire coast for 2026.
The reduction means next year’s catch will fall by roughly 47,000 metric tons, from 233,500 to 187,000 tons of fish.
But environmental and sportfishing organizations had argued for a 54 percent reduction in total allowable catch, citing the commission’s recently updated stock assessment indicating Atlantic menhaden populations were a one-third smaller than previously thought.
“This is nothing more than a performative nod to ecosystem-based fisheries management,” Will Poston, forage campaign manager for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said after the 16-2 vote. He said the commission “failed to fully respond to the science, jeopardizing the ability of menhaden to fulfill their role in the food chain.”
For commercial fishermen, however, the 2026 Atlantic cap adjustment means one-fifth of the current allowable catch will not reach the dock at Reedville, Virginia, home to the only menhaden processing plant on the East Coast.
The plant’s owner, Omega Protein, and industry partner Ocean Harvesters are pinning their futures on netting enough menhaden to keep the Reedville processing plant operating.
Monty Deihl, Ocean Harvesters’ chief executive officer, said the new cap will have little effect on menhaden’s ecological status, but it will result in fewer fishermen on the water.
“There’s no doubt we’re going to feel the impacts,” he said “These fishermen get paid by the size of the catch. So every one of them just took a 20 percent [pay] cut.”
The company, which also operates fishing fleets for Omega plants in Louisiana and Mississippi, is allowed to harvest roughly 156,000 metric tons of Atlantic menhaden annually. Roughly one-third of that catch comes from the lower Chesapeake Bay.
That makes Ocean Harvesters one of the largest domestic players in the fishery, currently valued at $14 billion annually but projected to grow to a $21 billion by 2035, according to the Future Market Insights, an economic research and consulting firm.
What’s the science?
The crux of the menhaden debate boils down to how one calculates ecosystem risk, said Genevieve Nesslage, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.
Nesslage, who is considered a leading expert on U.S. menhaden, said the stock has been managed “pretty conservatively” over the last decade on both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. She said all stakeholders “want menhaden and their predator fish populations to be healthy and to be fished at sustainable levels.”
“It’s really all about how risky do we want to be?” Nesslage said. “Obviously industry will have a different interpretation [of acceptable risk] than an environmental organization.”
Joseph W. Smith, a retired NOAA Fisheries expert who earlier this year published a comprehensive history on U.S. menhaden, said in an interview he believes overfishing is not occurring.
But he also acknowledged more advanced survey models and methodologies have fueled new doubts about the fishery’s overall health. “I think there’s a lot of angst and misinformation out there,” Smith said.
Nesslage and colleagues from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science will soon launch a study commissioned by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries — a research partnership between academia and industry with backing from the National Science Foundation — to do a comprehensive “roadmap” study for the Atlantic menhaden.
Among other things, the study will try to better estimate menhaden populations in the Chesapeake Bay and suggest additional ways for industry to protect against overfishing.
That research will coincide with another Atlantic commission effort to better understand menhaden concerns in the bay itself, with the possibility of lowering or reallocating the current baywide commercial catch limit of 51,000 metric tons.
But opponents of the industrial menhaden fishery maintain that another study, while valuable to the overall understanding of menhaden, will not keep the species from further decline as demand for menhaden byproducts remains strong.
In a Nov. 3 letter to President Donald Trump, nine Virginia-based conservation organizations operating under the banner “Make America Fish Again” called for an executive order ending all reduction fishing in the lower Chesapeake Bay.
“This isn’t just about conservation, it’s about economics,” the organizations wrote. “The industrial menhaden reduction fleet contributes a few hundred jobs in the region. But in doing so, they’re threatening thousands more in Virginia’s billion-dollar recreational fishing and coastal tourism economy.”
