June 17, 2026 — Forage fish—the small, low trophic level fish and, in some cases, crustaceans and cephalopods—that serve as food for larger predators, are a critical part of marine ecosystems. Unfortunately, many important forage fish, including Atlantic and Gulf menhaden, Atlantic herring, and Atlantic mackerel, have become the targets of high-volume, low-value fisheries that remove too many fish from the water, depleting forage fish populations and having potentially negative impacts on marine predators and recreational and commercial fisheries.
Other forage fish, such as alewives and blueback herring (collectively, “river herring”), American shad, and hickory shad, are killed as bycatch in other fisheries, collateral damage in mid-water trawls and other fisheries directed at other forage fish species.
While a few biologists have argued that forage fish fisheries create no threat to predator populations, most notably Dr. Ray Hilborn, et al., whose 2017 paper, “When does fishing forage species affect their predators?” argued that natural variations in forage fish populations have much more impact on forage fish abundance than do directed fisheries, the consensus is that directed forage fish fisheries need to be carefully managed, in order to prevent harm to marine predators.
In the same vein, also in 2017, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council adopted its Unmanaged Forage Omnibus Amendment, which, according to the Council,
“prohibits the development of new and expansion of existing directed commercial fisheries on unmanaged forage species in mid-Atlantic federal waters until the Council has had an adequate opportunity to assess the scientific information relating to any new or expanded directed fisheries and consider potential impacts to existing fisheries, fishing communities, and the marine ecosystems.”
The Omnibus Amendment was intended to protect important forage fish that don’t have the “celebrity” status of menhaden or river herring, forage fish that most people don’t think about, and many people haven’t even heard of, such as argentines, greeneyes, halfbeaks, lanternfish, pearlsides, sand lances (“sand eels”), cusk-eels, Atlantic saury, krill, etc.