Saving Seafood

Science

Stock assessment for US lobster shows population shifts, minor overfishing

October 31, 2025 — A recent stock assessment by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) indicates lobster stock on the East Coast of the U.S. is depleted to record low abundance in Southern New England (SNE), and overfishing of the stock is occurring in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank (GOM/GBK).

The lobster benchmark assessment found the stock in GOM/GBK – which accounts for the vast majority of lobster landings in the U.S. – has declined 34 percent since peak levels in 2018. According to the ASMFC, the GOM region in particular has accounted for an average of 82 percent of annual landings since 1982, while the GBK fishery accounts for 5 percent.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Herring count shows more work needed to boost population

October 30, 2025 — Twenty years ago, Massachusetts banned harvesting river herring in an attempt to protect alewife and blueback herring.

Last year the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission released a stock assessment that determined herring populations are stable throughout the coast, including Massachusetts.

Mike Palmer coordinates an annual spring herring count for the Association to Preserve Cape Cod. He said we need to be doing more to help the population rebound.

Palmer said the spring 2025 count showed below-average returns on the Cape. Since then, continuing drought conditions have been tough on river herring that require sufficient river flows to return to the ocean in the fall.

Read the full article at CAI

A Lifeline for Salmon: UCSC and NOAA Join Forces to Secure a Future for California’s Most Iconic Fish

October 30, 2025 — Nearly every day for the past 20 years, scientists from UC Santa Cruz and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have waded into Scott Creek, a 12-mile-long burbling stream in Santa Cruz County just a few miles north of Davenport.

Dressed in waders and toting bags and buckets, these scientists navigate the stream’s chilly waters and muddy banks in search of coho salmon. Along the coast of central California, coho salmon are endangered. But the young salmon in Scott Creek may hold the key to the species’ recovery.

As the southernmost population of coho in the state, the salmon in Scott Creek are adapted to warmer and drier conditions than their more northern cousins. By studying the evolution, ecology, and genetics of this population, scientists at UCSC and NOAA hope to gain insights that could help them ensure the survival of the species throughout California.

The project at Scott Creek is one of many that UCSC and NOAA have undertaken together to prevent the extinction of California’s iconic salmon. Since joining forces 25 years ago, the federal agency and the university have become the largest and most strategic force fighting to conserve salmon in California. But with climate change, habitat loss, overfishing, invasive species, and poor water management posing an ever-greater threat to salmon survival, the salmon-saving team continues to have its work cut out for it.

Read the full article at UC Santa Cruz

Research reports capture climate change impacts on halibut

October 29, 2025 — Two recent research reports focused on halibut spatial dynamics, habitat occupation, and spawning dynamics suggest that new management considerations of commercial stocks may be warranted.

The first document, published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries & Aquatic Sciences this past spring, focuses on identifying halibut spawning dynamics, including locating spawning grounds, and identifying the conditions occupied and the timing of occupation on these grounds, notes Austin Flanigan, a fisheries master student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and principal author of both papers.

Researchers attached pop-up satellite telemetry tags to large female halibut in the Northern Bering Sea, with time series data and tag reporting locations being used to infer spawning behavior and to identify occupied spawning habitat conditions, location, and timing

The research team found that these halibut occupied spawning habitats later and farther north than previously described. Their spawning habitat was occupied from January to May and reached as far north as the Russian continental shelf. They also observed that 42 percent of mature halibut never occupied presumed spawning habitat, suggesting the presence of skip spawning behavior. Such findings, they said, suggest that Pacific halibut exhibit unique spawning dynamics in the Northern Bering Sea, which may result in reduced reproductive potential within the northern population component.

Flanigan said that understanding reproductive output would require fecundity (number of eggs produced) data, as if skip spawning Pacific halibut have the same fecundity as those that spawn annually, then they would produce fewer offspring.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Horseshoe Crab Blood Has Long Helped Us Make Safe Medicines. Now, Alternatives That Spare the Ancient Creatures Might Be Breaking Through

October 28, 2025 — The American horseshoe crab is not the most glamorous or endearing animal. With its long, spiky tail, helmet-shaped shell and ten eyes, the 445-million-year-old species did not get this far relying on its good looks. But in this annual event, called a mass spawning, the crabs leave behind tens of thousands of eggs, which contribute to a wider ecosystem along the Eastern Seaboard and allow the ancient species to continue thriving.

Since the 1980s, humans have prized horseshoe crabs for another reason: The invertebrates’ light blue blood has likely benefitted anyone who has ever received a vaccine or flu shot. Equipped with a system that detects toxins as soon as they enter the crabs’ bloodstream, the blood is a key ingredient in a product that can detect contaminants in medicines. Pharmaceutical companies use the mechanism to ensure their drugs are safe. But amid concerns for the horseshoe crab population, conservationists, biotechnology experts and drug manufacturers alike have spent decades pushing for the adoption of synthetic alternatives that don’t harm the animal.

This spring, that effort reached a new milestone. For the first time, the industry’s primary regulatory body, the U.S. Pharmacopeia, officially recognized the alternatives as an option for companies to test vaccines. Now, 11 major pharmaceutical companies have reported an initial shift or intent to shift to these alternatives in a survey conducted by conservation groups. And the biggest producer of the blood-derived product publicly backed the crabless alternatives this summer.

Read the full article at Smithsonian Magazine

SCEMFIS funds new project to study menhaden in Chesapeake Bay

October 27, 2025 — As debate over the sustainability of the menhaden fishery in the Chesapeake Bay continues between the fishing industry and environmental groups, the Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS) has funded a new project that will create a detailed roadmap for managing reduction fishery more effectively.

SCEMFIS said in a release the new project will feature scientists from Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and NOAA and aims to establish meaningful harvest caps for Atlantic menhaden in the bay. The project will review existing menhaden science – including estimated biomass, migration patterns, and the consumption of menhaden by other species – and find gaps in information that can be filled via more research.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Stormy seas

October 24, 2025 — After 3 weeks crisscrossing the frigid Bering Sea, much of it spent wrangling crabs scooped from the sea floor, Erin Fedewa faced a final challenge: getting nearly 200 live animals to a lab 3000 kilometers away in less than 24 hours.

“This is always a little bit risky,” said Fedewa, a fisheries biologist from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as she stood on the deck of the Northwest Explorer, a 49-meter trawler converted for a summer research trip, while the ship was moored at Nome’s port.

She lifted the lid on a waist-high blue plastic box and peered inside. There, immersed in 900 liters of seawater, lay her charges—dozens of what appeared to be enormous spiders, their leg spans the size of hub caps. Chunks of sea ice bobbed beside these snow crabs (Chionoecetes opilio), stirred by a pump to keep the animals bathed in the coldest water possible.

For Fedewa, success would mean the difference between months of productive research and de facto crab stew. She learned this the hard way in 2022, when the ship on which she was working docked in Nome and scientists filled the crab tanks with water siphoned directly from Norton Sound, a shallow, warmer part of the Bering Sea. “They just died,” she said.

That small fiasco is a microcosm of the recent fate of snow crabs in much of the Bering Sea. An unprecedented underwater heat wave there in 2018 and ’19 set off a chain reaction that led to the disappearance of an estimated 47 billion crabs, one of the largest marine die-offs ever documented. Suddenly, a $150 million fishery mythologized in the Deadliest Catch reality TV show found itself with no catch at all. State regulators for the first time banned Bering Sea snow crab fishing in 2023 and ’24, and the U.S. government declared a federal fishery disaster. The fishery reopened this year. But crabbing boats were only allowed to haul in a tiny fraction of what they had caught previously. The collapse “has had massive impacts,” says Scott Goodman, a fisheries biologist and executive director of the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation, which is funded by the crab industry.

Read the full article at Science.org

Meet the scientist exposing shrimp fraud across the South. ‘I’m a little bit of an evangelist.’

October 24, 2025 — Dave Williams has been to hundreds of seafood restaurants across the South over the past year, and he isn’t hunting for the best shrimp po-boy or crawfish étouffée.

From Texas to North Carolina — and at more than 200 restaurants and three festivals in Louisiana — the commercial fisheries scientist and his team have collected minuscule shrimp samples for a rapid genetic test. The goal is to determine whether the restaurant is serving local shrimp or foreign imports. It’s all part of Williams’ mission to help revitalize the Gulf of Mexico’s ailing coastal industry.

Williams, who does this work through his company SeaD Consulting, presented his findings to Louisiana shrimpers and seafood enthusiasts at the Louisiana Shrimp Festival and Shrimp Aid at the Broadside in Mid-City earlier this month. Attendees sampled dishes like shrimp birria tacos and tempura-fried shrimp, while listening to live music and even watching a puppet show.

Read the full article at NOLA

Menhaden Fisheries Coalition Applauds Science-Based Review of Chesapeake Bay Menhaden Harvest Cap

October 24, 2025 — The following was released by the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition:

The Menhaden Fisheries Coalition today welcomed a newly funded Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS) project to produce a research roadmap for Atlantic menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay as a long-overdue opportunity to replace political compromise with sound science.

For nearly twenty years, the Chesapeake Bay menhaden harvest cap, a harvest limit that applies only to the reduction fishery, has been managed without biological justification. Regulators and scientists have repeatedly acknowledged this fact. The new project from SCEMFIS will identify the research needed to finally develop what the scientists leading the project call a “scientifically defensible and ecologically meaningful Chesapeake Bay cap.”

Regulators Acknowledge Current Bay Cap Was Never Based on Science
When the cap was first imposed in 2006, it was a political compromise between Virginia, Maryland, and environmental groups, not a conservation measure grounded with a scientific justification. As the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) own Executive Director at the time, Vince O’Shea, testified before Congress in 2008, the Bay Cap was established “in response to a political problem” and “there was not a science basis for the Cap.”

That view was echoed by ASMFC’s scientific staff. In 2012, the Menhaden Plan Development Team concluded, “The annual Chesapeake Bay harvest cap is not based on a scientifically quantified harvest threshold, fishery health index, or fishery population level study.”

In a follow-up report that same year, the ASMFC Technical Committee stated: “The TC stands by its previous recommendation that, given the current fishery and history of landings, there has not appeared to be any biological benefit to the Chesapeake Bay Reduction Cap since it was implemented.”

The Technical Committee reinforced this position during the Commission’s December 2012 meeting, with the then-chairperson noting that, “Given the current structure of the industry right now, and the fish that they harvest, and the biological information that we’re collecting, there doesn’t seem to be any benefit” from the Bay Cap.  

Previous ASMFC Chairman Confirms Lack of Evidence for Bay Cap
When Virginia appealed a 41% cut to the Bay Cap in 2018, ASMFC Chairman Jim Gilmore stated in a formal letter that “there is no evidence in Amendment 3 to support the view that lowering the Bay Cap was necessary to protect the Bay as a nursery area for menhaden and there is no evidence to suggest the Bay Cap is necessary to protect the Bay as a nursery for other species.” He concluded: “Leadership agrees the Amendment does not provide sufficient evidence to support such claims.”

Call for a Science-Based Approach
Despite repeated coastwide stock increases and consistent findings that the Atlantic menhaden population is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring, the Chesapeake Bay menhaden harvest cap has remained fixed at 51,000 metric tons, less than half the level originally set in 2006. Meanwhile, the ASMFC has allowed other Bay fisheries, including Maryland and Potomac River bait harvesters, to increase their quotas.

The Chesapeake Bay menhaden harvest cap has become a symbol of how fisheries policy can drift away from science with outside influence from special interest groups dictating management strategies. The ASMFC’s own scientists have said for over a decade that there is no biological justification for this cap.

The Need for a Research Roadmap
The SCEMFIS-funded effort, led by scientists from the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and NOAA, will begin by conducting an extensive review of the existing data on relevant issues such as Atlantic menhaden biomass, the movement of schooling pelagic fish, and the consumption of Atlantic menhaden by Chesapeake Bay predators. They will also work with the industry to review data sources such as landings data and spotter pilot reports to complement existing peer-reviewed studies and other sources of data.

After the review, the researchers will identify knowledge gaps, and will propose new study designs and methodologies to fill these knowledge gaps to inform a Chesapeake Bay menhaden harvest cap that is based on data and is scientifically defensible.

SCEMFIS is a collaborative project between the fishing industry and leading finfish and shellfish researchers aimed at improving our understanding of important commercial species and supporting sustainable management of the fisheries that depend on them. It is part of the National Science Foundation’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers program.

About the Menhaden Fishery
Atlantic menhaden support the largest commercial fishery by weight on the U.S. East Coast and sustain hundreds of unionized, family-supporting jobs in rural Virginia communities where few comparable opportunities exist. Fishermen are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400, earning family-sustaining wages and full benefits. The fishery is certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council, the gold standard for responsible fisheries, and the ASMFC has repeatedly found that menhaden is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.

About the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition
The Menhaden Fisheries Coalition (MFC) is a collective of menhaden fishermen, related businesses, and supporting industries. Comprised of businesses along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition conducts media and public outreach on behalf of the menhaden industry to ensure that members of the public, media, and government are informed of important issues, events, and facts about the fishery.

SCEMFIS Funds Chesapeake Bay Menhaden Research Roadmap to Inform a Scientifically Defensible Bay Cap

October 23, 2025 — The following was released by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries:

The Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS) has funded a new project that will create a detailed and actionable roadmap that identifies the research needed to develop a scientifically defensible and ecologically meaningful Chesapeake Bay harvest cap for Atlantic menhaden.

The project, funded at the Center’s fall meeting, is being led by scientists from the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL) at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES), the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), and NOAA. The team is experienced in matters related to Atlantic menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay, bringing decades of peer-reviewed research, assessment leadership, and survey design expertise to this work.

What the project will do
Drs. Genevieve Nesslage and Michael Wilberg (UMCES), Drs. Robert Latour and James Gartland (VIMS), and Dr. Amy Schueller (NOAA SEFSC), will conduct an extensive review of existing menhaden science, focusing on factors such as estimated menhaden biomass, migration patterns of schooling fish, and the consumption of menhaden and other forage species by Chesapeake Bay predators. The review will identify gaps in available information and propose specific study designs, analytical approaches, timelines, and estimated costs to guide new Bay-focused menhaden research.

Research recommendations will likely involve a combination of new data collection and analyses of existing datasets, including industry data such as landings information and spotter pilot reports.

The roadmap is intended to be practical and actionable, leveraging tools and data already in use and identifying where new information, such as novel tagging, hydroacoustics, and spatial modeling, would add significant value.

Why this matters 
Current menhaden management in the Chesapeake Bay is built around a landings limit rather than a Bay-specific biological target. Commercial reduction landings of Atlantic menhaden from the Bay are currently subject to a 51,000-metric-ton Bay cap. This cap is based on the average of 2012–2016 reduction landings from the Bay, but it is not a biological reference point, and thus cannot, by itself, inform managers about the status of the portion of the stock within the Bay or the potential ecological impacts of harvest on other species.

Over time, the Chesapeake Bay menhaden harvest cap has been adjusted as a matter of policy: reduced from 109,020 metric tons (2006) to 87,216 metric tons (2012) and then to 51,000 metric tons (2017). These caps were not based on Bay-specific biological analyses, and were intended as precautionary, interim limits. This project will define the research activities needed to evaluate Bay-specific conditions and ecological interactions so that future decisions about the Bay Cap can be grounded in robust, transparent science.

Economic importance of Atlantic menhaden
Atlantic menhaden support the largest commercial fishery by weight on the U.S. East Coast and play a critical role as forage for predators. The fishery supports a unionized workforce with strong wages and full benefits in a rural region with few comparable opportunities.

Project Team (selected qualifications in Atlantic menhaden & Chesapeake Bay)
  • Genevieve M. Nesslage, Ph.D., Associate Research Professor, CBL (UMCES)
    • Quantitative fisheries scientist with research focusing on Atlantic menhaden spawning locations and larval dispersal, fishery sampling, survey design, overwintering habitat use, and predator-prey modeling. Former Senior Stock Assessment Scientist at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
  • Michael J. Wilberg, Ph.D., Professor of Fisheries Science, CBL (UMCES)
    • Fisheries stock assessment and management strategy evaluation specialist with research focused on Atlantic menhaden movement, mortality, growth, and predator-prey modeling. Lead author of the 2020 survey design for Atlantic menhaden in Chesapeake Bay.
  • Robert J. Latour, Ph.D., Professor, VIMS (William & Mary)
    • Quantitative fisheries ecologist focusing on predator–prey interactions, population dynamics, and habitat modeling. Lead/co-author of the 2023 study on female Atlantic menhaden reproductive biology and fecundity and co-author (with Gartland) of Virginia’s 2023 Atlantic Menhaden Research Planning report to the General Assembly.
  • James Gartland, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, VIMS (William & Mary)
    • Quantitative fisheries scientist with extensive experience in the development of fisheries monitoring surveys, prey consumption models, and ecological indicators, including in Chesapeake Bay. Co-author of the 2023 menhaden fecundity study (with Latour and Schueller) and co-author of Virginia’s 2023 Atlantic Menhaden Research Planning report guiding Bay-specific research priorities.
  • Amy M. Schueller, Ph.D., Research Fish Biologist, NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center
    • Lead assessment analyst for Atlantic and Gulf menhaden and key contributor to the working group on ecological reference points (ERPs) that underpin Atlantic menhaden management.

About SCEMFIS
The Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS) brings together academic and industry expertise to address urgent scientific challenges facing sustainable fisheries. Through advanced methods, analytical tools, and collaborative research, SCEMFIS works to reduce uncertainty in stock assessments and improve the long-term sustainability of key marine resources.

SCEMFIS is an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center supported by the National Science Foundation. Industry organizations join SCEMFIS through an Industry Membership Agreement with one of the center’s site universities and contribute both financial support and valuable expertise to help shape research priorities.

Its university partners include the University of Southern Mississippi (lead institution) and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William and Mary. The center also collaborates with scientists from a broad network of institutions, including Old Dominion University, Rutgers University, the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Rhode Island. These researchers bring deep expertise in finfish, shellfish, and marine mammal science.

Demand for SCEMFIS’s services continues to grow, driven by the fishing industry’s need for responsive, science-based support. The center provides timely access to expert input on stock assessment issues, participates in working groups, and conducts targeted studies that lead to better data collection, improved survey design, and more accurate modeling-all in service of sustainable, science-driven fishery management.