November 3, 2025 — The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission approved a 20 percent reduction in the catch of “menhaden,” an important lobster bait more commonly known as “pogies.”
Read the full article at Fox 23
US judges order Trump administration to use emergency fund to pay for November food benefits
November 3, 2025 — Two U.S. judges have ordered the Trump administration to issue food assistance benefits via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) despite the ongoing government shutdown.
In response, the Trump administration announced that it would use an emergency fund to provide partial benefits for the SNAP program in November, although it will not tap into other sources to fully fund the program.
NFI, NOAA settle lawsuit over MMPA import restrictions; agency stays import ban of swimming crab
November 3, 2025 — The National Fisheries Institute and several seafood companies have settled their lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) over its recent determinations on Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) requirements.
NFI sued NMFS in early October over the agency’s decision to find most blue crab fisheries in major countries did not meet MMPA equivalency standards, a requirement for any country looking to export seafood products to the U.S. NMFS found 240 foreign fisheries did not comply with the regulations, which meant as of 1 January, 2026 products from those fisheries would be banned from entering the U.S. market.
CALIFORNIA: Recreational crab season opens along the Sonoma Coast as state warns of biotoxin risk
November 3, 2025 — There’s a catch to this year’s crab season and it’s not just in the traps.
The recreational Dungeness crab season opened Saturday along the Sonoma Coast, but state officials are warning fishers about potentially dangerous levels of domoic acid in the crabs’ internal organs.
In a health advisory issued Oct. 24, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California Department of Public Health said unhealthy levels of the naturally occurring toxin have been found in the viscera, or the internal organs of the crab. Officials warned that cooking the crab does not destroy the toxin, advising fishers to not ingest any part of the viscera.
Domoic acid poisoning in humans can cause nausea, dizziness and in severe cases, even memory loss or death, public health officials cautioned.
Despite the warnings, recreational crabbers can still hit the seas, unlike Bodega Bay’s Dick Ogg and other commercial fisherman who have been sidelined following seven straight years of season delays to protect endangered marine life from entanglements.
For Ogg, who predicts the commercial season will once again not open until January, and other fishermen across the state, these delays take a major toll on their profit margins.
“The impact is significant,” Ogg said Saturday. “What we have lost is our Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s crab market. Everything has been pushed ahead to when people are less interested in getting the resource. It’s a lot more difficult and the financial impact to everyone is pretty significant.”
National TRAP Program targets ghostly issue with second round of coastal clean up funding
November 3, 2025 — Lurking in the waters along our shorelines, a haunting presence is luring marine life to their untimely demise and trapping their spirits in an underwater purgatory. This isn’t the plot of a new Halloween blockbuster, it’s the unfortunate impact of derelict fishing equipment commonly known as “ghost traps.”
William & Mary’s Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences & VIMS has awarded $1.8 million to 13 organizations throughout the U.S. focused on the removal of derelict fishing gear, which poses a significant threat to the sustainability of coastal and marine environments and the fishing industries from which they originate. This is the second year of subawards distributed through the National Fishing Trap Removal, Assessment and Prevention (TRAP) Program.
A scientific solution for a ghoulish problem
In the United States, commercial trap fisheries generate over $1 billion in annual revenue from seafood sales, referred to as landings. Each year, traps are lost due to vessel-gear interactions, storms and gear degradation. These “ghost traps” become inaccessible to fishermen but continue to function, resulting in mortality of both target and non-target species, habitat damage and reduced fishery landings. A 2016 report found that removing just 10% of derelict crab pots and lobster traps could result in an additional $831 million in global landings annually.
In 2023, the Batten School & VIMS was the recipient of an $8 million, four-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Marine Debris Program to administer the National TRAP Program. In addition to distributing approximately $1.5 million annually to fund regional cleanup efforts, the program has established a standardized national database to evaluate the environmental and economic benefits of the removal efforts and to inform future policies.
In its first year of funding, the TRAP Program awarded over $1.4 million to fund 11 projects. So far, the efforts have resulted in the removal of over 7,000 derelict traps totaling more than 300,000 pounds of debris. A number of projects are still recovering derelict traps, and removals in Louisiana are set to begin in February. Many other regional success stories have surfaced from these efforts.
“We are thrilled with the initial results from our inaugural TRAP Program recipients. Their success is a testament to the impact that locally-designed solutions can have on global issues,” said Kirk Havens, director of the Batten School & VIMS Center for Coastal Resources Management, which administers the TRAP Program under the direction of co-principal investigators Professor Donna Bilkovic and Associate Professor Andrew Scheld. “Our second round of recipients have demonstrated that same creativity, thoughtfulness and local community engagement in their project proposals, and we are proud to support them as they work for the benefit of their communities and marine ecosystems.”
Read the full article at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences
Untangling the Net: Independent Fishermen Push Back Against Bureaucratic Overreach
October 31, 2025 — The following was released by the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy:
Family fishers overwhelmingly dominate the small commercial fishing industry, with businesses that span generations. In fact, the family of Advocacy’s very own Chief Counsel Casey B. Mulligan has been fishing off the coast of New York since the 1600s.
But today, American fishermen are burdened by excessive regulations that control where and how much they can fish, even when concerns about overfishing are dated or exaggerated.
“Generally speaking, the situation that small businesses are in requires regulatory loosening,” Greg DeDomenico, Fisheries Management Specialist for Lund’s Fisheries, said.
Over a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, driven in part by a recent Advocacy letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Advocacy staff met with fishermen from the Northeast to discuss how the Trump Administration could ease rules to benefit fishers and the economies they drive.
The first topic of conversation focused on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), mandated observers. According to federal law, fishermen are required to carry federal observers on their boats. These observers support stock assessments, assist in data gathering for fisheries management, and act as enforcement agents.
In 2020, NOAA issued a rule requiring some fishermen to pay for the observers, despite the law explicitly stating that the government was responsible for funding the program.
The costs that the National Marine Fisheries Service impose on small businesses are substantial: $710 per day per observer. Notably, the fishermen never objected to the presence of federal officials, just paying the observer’s salaries.
“We support observers,” said DiDomeneco. “We take a lot of observers. But we don’t want to pay them when the government should.” Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Seafreeze LTD, has been fighting the economic impact of the observers rule since it was proposed in 2015.
“If the NMFS wanted more observer coverage than what Congress appropriated funding for,” Lapp said, “they made boats pay for it out of pocket.” This negates the Congressional power of the purse.
Lapp successfully compelled the New England and Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Councils to undertake an economic analysis, but only the Mid-Atlantic Council found a substantial economic impact to the fishing industry.
Not only does NOAA charge fishers for ecological and enforcement work, but they also mismanage funds legally dedicated to promoting and developing US fisheries and seafood markets. The fishermen who spoke with Advocacy described NOAA’s mismanagement of a federal fund created by the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act, which was designed to take tariffs on imported seafood and use that money to balance the seafood trade deficit by marketing US seafood and supporting economic development of commercial fisheries. Instead of using this money for its designated purpose, NOAA annually diverts the funds into its general operations account, while commercial fishing profits continue to decline.
The fishermen directly contrasted this with how the Department of Agriculture treats American beef and pork, which get dedicated advertising campaigns. Tyler Macallister, owner and captain of Off the Charts Sportfishing and commercial fisherman for 41 years, noted that doing so would allow fishermen to “develop the domestic markets that exist and get away from imports.”
Even small changes, like allowing American-caught scup to be rebranded as “Northern snapper,” would result in more robust markets for American seafood. But as Lapp noted, the FDA has rejected this idea in the past while giving deference to foreign imports sold under similar market names.
Another major concern for the fishermen came from coastal wind farms. Macallister, who has a background in marine biology and has researched offshore wind development, noted that wind turbine installation is undoubtedly damaging the marine environment, rendering fishing impossible.
“Wind farms diminish our access to the places we’ve been fishing for fifty years,” said DiDomenico. It is unacceptable to have a large foreign investment come to this country and displace fishermen without caring whatsoever.”
The stakeholders expressed frustration that their fishing grounds were treated differently from farmland. Lapp recalled that the Department of Agriculture recently issued a rule saying, “you cannot put windmills on prime US farmland.” “We should have one that says you can’t put windmills on prime fishing grounds,” Lapp countered.
Lapp also noted the safety risks of operating around a wind farm, which interfere with marine radar and Coast Guard search and rescue operations.
The consensus from the conversation was that it was time to better support US commercial fishermen.
“We’ve lost the plot,” said Jared Auerbach, CEO of Red’s Best Seafood. “When we’re interacting with all these agencies, it doesn’t feel like you have the same goal of healthy seafood and sustainable fish. Sometimes it feels like the goal is to keep your business small.”
Lobster Population Falls off New England, Leading Regulators to Declare Overfishing
October 31, 2025 — A new report says America’s lobsters, which have been in decline since 2018, are now being overfished off New England.
The stock has declined by 34% since that year in its most important fishing grounds, the regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission said Thursday. The commission said it now considers overfishing of the species to be occurring, and that could bring new management measures that restrict fishermen from catching them in the future.
But the lobster population has shown “rapid declines in abundance in recent years,” the commission said in a statement.
The assessment said the decline and overfishing were taking place in fishing areas off Maine and Massachusetts where most lobster fishing takes place. The assessment also considered the southern New England lobster stock, which it said has been depleted for years and remains so.
NORTH CAROLINA: Pound for pound, North Carolina’s pound net fishery delivers
October 31, 2025 — For more than 150 years, North Carolina fishermen have been using pound nets. Gaither Midgette is among those keeping the fishery going.
Before the Civil War, the American shad fishery in the South was dominated by aristocrats, including George Washington. Plantation owners with deep pockets invested what would be millions of dollars today into the gear and infrastructure needed to harvest shad with haul seines of 2,000 yards or more. They depleted the resource, and during the Civil War in North Carolina, the Union Army destroyed most of the boats, nets, and buildings needed for the haul seine fishery. In 1863, North Carolina outlawed the fishery for the duration of the war in order to keep shad from being commandeered by, or sold to, Union Army commissaries.
The pause in the harvest during the war led to rebounding stocks, and in 1869, the Hattrick brothers brought the pound net to North Carolina. Pound nets required a much smaller investment and provided a higher return than haul seines. A few haul seine operations remained, but increasingly, the shad fishery belonged to the common people. In addition, the pound nets often caught higher-value species at a time when ice was introduced to preserve the catch, and those fish could be shipped to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.
Over a hundred years later, the shad fishery has shrunk to almost nothing, but small-scale fishermen are still working the pound nets in Pamlico, Albemarle, and Croatan Sounds, and Gaither Midgette of Wanchese is among them. At 5:30 on a warm August morning, he fires up the 30-HP Honda 4-stroke on his pound skiff, a 20-foot by 6-foot wooden boat planked crossways on its flat bottom. “It’s all juniper-planked,” says Midgette. “The sides are all juniper, too. Glen Bradley built it about 20 years ago.” He steers down the canal from Spencer Yachts to the open water of Croatan Sound, between Roanoke Island and the mainland. “It won’t take too long. We’ll be finished by 7:30,” he says.
ASMFC Atlantic Striped Bass Board Approves Addendum III Without Reductions in Fishery Removals New Work Group Planned to Address Long-Term Management and Stock Concerns
October 31, 2025 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:
The Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board approved Addendum III to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for Atlantic Striped Bass. The Addendum modifies requirements for commercial tagging programs, implements a standard method of measuring total length for size limit regulations, and allows Maryland to change its Chesapeake Bay recreational season baseline if the state so chooses.
The Board decided to not move forward with the proposed 12% reduction in fishery removals after lengthy deliberation. The Board reviewed the preliminary estimates of 2025 recreational catch through June, which were lower than anticipated and suggested that the projections may have underestimated the probability of rebuilding by 2029 and overestimated the reductions necessary to rebuild. The Board noted that the over 4,000 public comments they received on the draft addendum were sharply divided on the issue, as was the Board itself. Ultimately, the Board maintained current recreational measures and commercial quotas, noting the severe economic consequences of the proposed reduction, the low fishing mortality rate in 2024, and preliminary indications of lower catch in 2025. However, the Board continued to express concern about the seven consecutive years of low recruitment in Chesapeake Bay and the impact on the stock as those weak year-classes become the majority of the spawning stock biomass after 2029. To address this, the Board approved the establishment of a Work Group to consider these upcoming stock and management challenges beyond 2029. The Board will further discuss the specific tasks and timing of this Work Group at subsequent Board meetings.
For commercial tagging, the Addendum requires states to tag commercially harvested fish by the first point of landing. Previously, states could choose the point of tagging, including tagging at the point of sale. This change to when tagging occurs addresses concerns that waiting to tag fish until the point of sale could increase the risk of illegal harvest. The three states that will need to switch their tagging program from point of sale to point of landing have until the end of 2028 to make that change due to the extensive administrative and programmatic transition needed.
For measuring total length, the Addendum specifies that when measuring total length of a striped bass it must be a straight-line measurement with upper and lower fork of the tail squeezed together. This definition applies to both sectors. This new definition addresses concerns that the previous lack of a standard definition was potentially undermining the intended conservation, consistency, and enforceability of the coastwide size limits, especially for narrow slot limits. States that do not have the new definition in place already have until January 1, 2027 to make changes to their state regulations.
For Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay recreational fishery, the Board approved Maryland’s ability to change its recreational season baseline (i.e., the timing, type, and duration of striped bass closures throughout the year) if the state so chooses. Maryland is considering changing its season baseline to simplify its Chesapeake Bay regulations as well as re-align access based on stakeholder input and release mortality rates. The new baseline is estimated to be net neutral calculated to maintain the same level of removals as compared to 2024. Maryland will notify the Board of its decision by December 31, 2025 in its state implementation plan.
Addendum III will be available in November on the Commission website athttps://asmfc.org/species/
CALIFORNIA: California reintroducing salmon by planting 350,000 spring-run Chinook eggs above dam
October 31, 2025 — The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) plans to inject 350,000 Chinook salmon eggs into the North Yuba River this fall as the state government looks for new ways to help struggling salmon populations recover.
This is the second year CDFW has taken this approach, collecting eggs fertilized at the Feather River Fish Hatchery in Oroville and then hydraulically injecting them into the river’s gravel substrate in November.
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