Inviting the Devil to Dinner: Louisiana Hatchery Dystopia
There are several videos doing the rounds on social media lately about stocking redfish into
The November ASMFC Menhaden Board meeting will be one for the ages, yet many advocates and anglers aren’t talking about it (or simply are unaware it’s happening). One corrected error in the menhaden stock assessment is now driving three separate fights at the same time. If we don’t keep them straight, we risk winning one and losing the others, to the detriment of the resource.
Here’s the shortest summary:
If you’re still reading, you’re our kind of people. Lock the doors and strap in for a more detailed rundown below.
The Coastwide Problem: Natural Mortality and the TAC
The 2025 single-species stock assessment update revised the estimate of natural mortality (M) — the rate at which menhaden die from causes other than fishing. Previous assessments used an M value of 1.17 based on a 2019 paper that re-analyzed 1960s tagging data. During the 2025 ERP benchmark process, scientists found an error in how magnet efficiency was calculated in that original paper. After correcting it, the Stock Assessment Subcommittee settled on a revised base estimate of M = 0.92.
That single change had massive consequences.
When the model assumes high natural mortality, it must conclude the population is very large to produce the observed catches and survey indices. When natural mortality is lowered, the model concludes the population does not need to be as large. The result: the time-series average age-1+ biomass came out roughly 37% lower than in the 2022 update, and fishing mortality estimates rose.
That lower biomass was fed into the ecological reference point models. The previous TAC of 233,550 mt is now projected to have a 100% probability of exceeding the new ERP fishing mortality target. Achieving a reasonable chance of staying at or below the target would have required roughly a 50% cut.
Last fall the Board only approved a one-year TAC for 2026 (186,840 mt — a 20% reduction) and explicitly deferred the multi-year decision to the November 2026 Annual Meeting. Because the fishery has only been landing about 77–80% of the quota in recent years, a 20% cut is largely a paper reduction. Menhaden are not paper fish.
This is the single most important fight on the table.
The Chesapeake Problem & “The Bay Cap”
Draft Addendum II focuses on the Chesapeake Bay Reduction Fishery Cap — the limit on how much of the coastwide quota can be taken from inside the Bay.
Key options under consideration:
One critical point that keeps getting confused: The Bay Cap is not extra quota. It is a sub-limit inside the coastwide TAC. At the current 51,000 mt against a 186,840 mt TAC, the Bay Cap represents about 27% of the total allowable catch. Cutting the Bay Cap is important for localized depletion concerns in the Chesapeake, but it does not solve the larger coastwide problem created by the assessment error.
The Reallocation Problem
There is growing pressure, particularly from New England, to shift quota from states that do not fully use their allocation to states that will. Maine’s menhaden landings have risen sharply as Atlantic herring have collapsed. The lobster industry needs large volumes of bait, and Maine now has the infrastructure to take significantly more menhaden. This is a real economic pressure. It is also a conservation risk.
Moving unused quota to states that will catch every pound increases actual removals even if the paper TAC stays the same. In a fishery that is already over the corrected science, unused quota is currently one of the only things keeping realized harvest below the limit on the page. Reallocation without a meaningful TAC reduction is the wrong direction. Changing state allocations requires a full addendum process under Amendment 3. It cannot be done casually at the November meeting.
What We Should Be Fighting For
We can get a meaningful reduction on both the coastwide TAC and the Bay Cap. That should be the goal. Conflating the three issues — or letting reallocation become the main event — risks walking away with a paper win that does not actually put more menhaden in the water. The assessment error is black-and-white. The science supports a substantial cut. That is where the focus needs to stay.
Bay Cap (Draft Addendum II)
This has a formal public comment process. Hearings will occur in September and October. Final action is scheduled for the November Annual Meeting. Submit formal comments.
2027–2029 Coastwide TAC
This is a separate agenda item with no formal public comment period. The only way to influence it is to email your state’s commissioners on the Menhaden Management Board directly. Our formal position blog will include contact information and suggested language.
We can come together and force the reductions the corrected assessment requires — both coastwide and in the Bay. That is the real win. That is what ASGA will be pushing. Stay tuned for our formal position piece with specific preferred options and comment instructions
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14 Responses
The over harvesting of these fish are damaging an entire coast. From predatory fish and the birds that depend on them as a food source. I live on the water baby menhaden used to be so plentiful in the lagoons and creeks. In the ocean I used to see massive schools of adult menhaden which have disappeared. We need to stop the over harvesting before it’s to late.
We must act now not later,we are selling the future of the bay and the future of our children to have a healthy bay for their generation!!
For decades i have fished the waters of eastern long island ny. Menhaden were everywhere. Peanut bumker flooded the bays and harbors of the south and north shore i would see acres of adult menhaden
In the oceans. Massive schools
Now the back bays are devoid of bunker ospreys chicks are starving
This has to be changed. We got ride of DDT but menhaden reduction industry is reversing all that success
Please .. stop this waste of our American Resource
And lobstermen. First you wiped out the massive schools of Mackerel and
Herring. So now you turn to menhaden.
Time to boycott lobster
Thank you for sharing this information. I destruction of the menhaden colony isa total failure of our regulatory agencies. Omega makes fertilizer out of menhaden while the Bay starves. Who is getting paid to allow this to happen? This is much more than a disgrace. It is a crime.
The problem here is that the Beaufort Assessment Model is modeling nothing . A simple change in M in 2020 -2025 nearly doubles BAM assessment of stock size? NMFS and ASMFC employees and Commissioners never blinked a single eye at this fantastically absurd
event. Nobody at either so called management agency spoke a word to question this insane proposition. The BAM model never detected the collapsing population in the five years the error resided in the model . Error raised TAC by 20% and now not a single group of menhaden in Mt Sinai Harbor , mid Sound on Long Island. Nothing. Cormorants are gone. This harbor was stuffed with multiple year classes for as long as I have been watching…. 50 years. The up side of this fiasco…. It proves that the BAM model, programmed and invented by THE MATH CULT , is the largest scam since The Piltdown Man. More…. To believe you can estimate how many menhaden die of natural causes annually( M ) from Nova Scotia to The Keys and to state that the veracity of the entire management system relies on accuracy of this estimate is madness. THE MATH CULT is mad! These Math Cult statisticians are fantasists. Our voting commissioners / incessant proxies are absentee (political hacks who are more interested in reading the lunch menus than making an informed decision and asking the right questions to end the madness. They lack the math and computer skills to even understand how the BAM model works. I gave a copy of the BAM models equations etc to a colleague who taught math the a local college. He showed it around the department …. the opinion of the math professors was to understand and use the model minimally requires a Masters degree in Applied Statistics and to service , reprogram and write into the program is an equally weighty knowledge of computer programming .
Our commissioners lack the capacity and interest to make an informed decision. They are simply picking from a series of options like a Chinese lunch menu supplied by the MATH CULT, that’s when they show up to the meetings and don’t sent the proxies. THIS ERROR EVENT demonstrates the BAM model and their ilk are capable of destroying our fisheries as they did to our cod fishery. Notice the independent researchers Ault et al, U Miami , who had to inform the MATH CULT and the entire ASMFC of this monstrous error.They calculated M to be .56 not 1.17 or the new error corrected.91 ASMFC refused to enter .56 and entered .91 Into model and adjusted TAC based on another erroneous M . Having to enter .56 terrified the ASMFC . The TAC should have been cut 50% based on .56 and left for at least five years . Nobody at ASMFC reads the comments placed in the public comment period. They have difficulty even attending the meetings and send their proxies.
Thank you for your detailed comments. Beware, the ASMFC will be pressured to wait until they do a full analysis of the bay population. It will give Omega more time, as the analysis is expected to take three years.
I believe we need to buy the single company at the heart of this conversation, Reedville, and close it down. The US government has spent, in just the last year and a half, 4 billion dollars to buy back leases for offshore windmills. It could easily spend a 10th of that to buy and close Reedville. Analogous to buying parkland, open space or any number of “public good” expenditures, the purchase of this company and concurrent minimal harvest requirements on this most important fish through a declaration that it is owned by the public, for the public good, as a public resource.
Private Equity values companies like Reedville every day. I’m not a lawyer but Eminent domain laws could move this along. And it’s a Canadian company, so getting the current US administration aboard might be a “strike while the iron is hot” moment.
Or we can continue fiddling around with barely understood science. Get the conservationists onboard (Whales, etc.), get the sportfishing community more riled up, the tackle and hospitality industries on board.
First up, enlist the right politicians that could use this as a rallying cry in their respective districts.
Hey Michael, do you think you are the first person who ever thought of this?
Buying Reedville and padlocking the door is a satisfying sentence. It is not a management plan.
The fish are already a public resource. That is the whole point of the public-trust doctrine and the ASMFC process. You do not need to purchase a factory to establish that menhaden belong to the public. What you need is a cap that actually limits localized depletion in the Bay and a coastwide TAC that is not built on a broken mortality input.
Eminent domain does not apply to the ocean, and it does not apply to a migratory fish stock. It applies to specific private property taken for a public use, with just compensation. Reedville is a plant on land. The menhaden are not inside the building. Even if the government wrote a check tomorrow, harvest could still move, get reallocated, or get prosecuted as a takings fight that eats a decade while the reduction fleet keeps fishing.
The wind-lease comparison does not travel. Those were federal lease contracts the government itself issued and then bought back. This would be seizing a private processing business and calling the stock “parkland.” That is a slogan, not a statute.
We are not fiddling around with science for sport. We are trying to fix the actual levers: quota, spatial concentration, and the fact that the last management action was based on the wrong natural mortality number. Closing one plant by checkbook does not fix that. Getting the harvest down does.
Ask google or AI “what’s the most important fish in the Atlantic Ocean?”
So glad the ASGA exists and is focused on science and logic rather than memberships and raffles. Hats off for always giving it both barrels
Sorry for being uninformed, but can you provide directions for how to submit comment?
Is the “Formal Position” blog out yet? Or still to come?
Thanks very much!
Randy,
We are working on the blog right now. TY for the comment and please check back in the next few days for the positions/direction blog.
Well, who would have known again that the commercial fishing does the damage and the recreational fishermen and women suffer the consequences ? This will continue as long as clowns sitting in cubicles behind a computer screen who probably don’t even fish make more regulations and decide the future of recreational fishing, our present & future generations of anglers i feel sorry for, it doesn’t look too promising, sad to say the least. From a lifelong northeast fisherman of over 60 yrs.
The most important fish in the ocean. See my article in the Cape May Herald. August 12 , edition. How do we get more people involved.
The rockfish are depleted, the same now happening with white perch and the ospreys can’t feed there young. Our nests on the water are going vacant. This is long overdue. Politicians in VA have allowed this awful over harvesting of menhaden for decades. It needs to be stopped.