September 16, 2026 — Atlantic menhaden may be one of the most debated fish in the Chesapeake Bay, but a Virginia fisheries scientist told a Mathews County, Virginia audience last month that some of the strongest claims surrounding the species supersede what scientists can actually demonstrate.
Dr. Robert J. Latour, a professor at William & Mary’s Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, presented “Atlantic Menhaden — One Fish, Many Opinions” on August 12 at Williams Wharf Landing as part of the Mathews Land Conservancy lecture series.
Over the course of an hour, Dr. Latour walked the audience through the biology of menhaden, the history of a fishery that once stretched along much of the Atlantic Coast, modern stock assessments and the increasingly complicated effort to manage a forage fish that is both commercially valuable and an important part of the marine food web.
The picture he presented was considerably more nuanced than claims advanced by activist groups that portray the commercial fishery as simply removing too many menhaden from the water and as being the culprit in most if not all of the Chesapeake’s woes.
At the coastwide level, Dr. Latour said, the scientific assessment does not indicate that menhaden are being overfished. Biomass has increased over the assessment period, while recruitment — the addition of young fish to the population — continues to fluctuate from year to year but demonstrates continued reproduction and survival.
That distinction matters because menhaden have increasingly become the focus of arguments that commercial harvest is depriving striped bass, ospreys and other predators of food.
Dr. Latour explained that while Atlantic menhaden are still considered a single genetic stock from Maine to Florida, the way that stock is managed has evolved. Rather than relying solely on traditional single-species management, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission now uses ecological reference points designed to account for menhaden’s role as forage and the needs of predator species when setting harvest levels.
A much smaller fishery than it once was
Dr. Latour also put today’s commercial fishery into historical perspective.
At its height, the Atlantic menhaden reduction industry included roughly 145 vessels and about 25 factories. Today, the reduction fleet has contracted to roughly 7 to 10 vessels and a single remaining processing plant.
Dr. Latour cautioned against interpreting that contraction simply as evidence that fishing exhausted the resource. Economics, changing waterfront development and restrictions on where reduction fishing could occur also significantly contributed to the industry’s disappearance from much of the coast.
Likewise, the current coastwide harvest is only a fraction of its historical peak. Dr. Latour showed the audience that today’s catch is roughly 28 percent of peak historical levels, with removals declining substantially over time and more recently stabilizing under modern harvest controls.
That historical context complicates one of the images frequently used by activist groups in the menhaden debate: enormous nets and large quantities of fish being taken from the water. The biological question is not simply whether a catch looks large, but whether the population can sustain its level of fishing mortality.
According to the stock assessment Dr. Latour presented, coastwide fishing mortality is not currently producing overfishing.
The Chesapeake question is harder
Dr. Latour was particularly careful in distinguishing what scientists know about the Atlantic-wide population from what they are working to learn about menhaden specifically inside Chesapeake Bay.
That distinction lies at the center of today’s issue.
Critics of the reduction fishery have increasingly argued that even if the coastwide population is healthy, commercial fishing could be causing “localized depletion” inside the Bay, leaving too few fish in particular places for predators or other fishermen.
Answering that question requires better Chesapeake-specific information about adult menhaden abundance, where the fish are, how long they remain in the Bay and how they move between Chesapeake and coastal waters.
Now, significant resources are being committed to developing that science.
Dr. Latour described an emerging research effort supported by state and private funding. The work is intended to build the scientific foundation needed to better understand menhaden abundance, movement, predator consumption, fishing patterns and possible localized depletion in the Chesapeake Bay.
The Science Center for Marine Fisheries, part of the National Science Foundation’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Center program, is funding a research roadmap to help scientists determine the most scientifically defensible and effective way to proceed with that work. The project brings together researchers from William & Mary’s VIMS & Batten School, including Dr. Latour, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory and NOAA to evaluate potential research methods, timelines and costs.
The research design and execution is developed and directed solely by the team of scientists.
New research aims at the questions behind the menhaden issue
A major portion of the lecture focused not on what scientists already know, but on an ambitious research effort designed to fill some of the gaps that have fueled years of debate.
Researchers plan to investigate seasonal abundance of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay, movement between the Bay and coastal waters, predator consumption, commercial fishing patterns and the possibility of localized depletion. Those are essentially the questions that would have to be answered to place future Bay-specific management decisions on firmer scientific footing.
Tagging could become an important part of that work.
Scientists are examining methods for tagging menhaden and detecting those fish when they later encounter the commercial fishery. If researchers can reliably recover information from tagged fish, the resulting data could help estimate movement, exploitation and eventually abundance — measurements that cannot be obtained simply by looking at coastwide stock numbers.
The broader research planning effort is evaluating several possible tools for producing those Bay-specific data, with tagging among the most promising approaches. Other potential approaches being evaluated include acoustic and LiDAR surveys, environmental DNA and stable-isotope analysis.
And contrary to claims made by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation that the commercial industry has stood in the way of menhaden research, Dr. Latour described the companies involved in the fishery as participants in the work.
He said he has been communicating with Ocean Harvesters and Omega Protein about ramping up the project, including the possibility of putting detection equipment aboard commercial fishing vessels and at the Reedville processing plant.
The cooperation is not incidental. Researchers themselves do not have the infrastructure to capture menhaden on anything approaching the scale of the commercial fleet, making access to commercial operations essential to an effective tagging program.
Cooperation with industry could allow scientists to test detection equipment under actual fishing conditions and ultimately determine whether information on tagged menhaden can be recovered reliably enough to answer larger population questions.
The research is particularly significant because the questions it seeks to answer are already being used in arguments for additional restrictions on the fishery.
Instead of allowing the debate to rest on competing assumptions about localized depletion, Virginia, scientists and the industry are putting resources into developing the data needed to determine whether it occurs, where it occurs and whether fishing contributes to it.
A fish with extraordinary reproductive capacity
Dr. Latour’s presentation also offered biological context that can get lost in debates centered on the sheer volume of commercial landings.
Menhaden are highly productive fish. In discussing reproduction, Dr. Latour showed that individual females can produce eggs numbering in the millions and used a roughly three-year-old fish to illustrate the species’ substantial reproductive capacity.
That does not mean harvest is irrelevant. It helps explain why fisheries scientists rely on population models, fishing mortality, biomass, recruitment and biological reference points rather than simply looking at the number of pounds landed in a given year.
Those assessments are intended to answer the fundamental management question: whether the fishery is removing menhaden faster than the population can sustain.
Dr. Latour’s presentation showed that the current coastwide answer is no.
Managing menhaden for predators, too
Another recurring criticism of commercial menhaden fishing is that traditional fishery management fails to account adequately for the fish’s ecological importance.
But Dr. Latour explained that Atlantic menhaden management has moved beyond a purely single-species approach.
Ecological reference points are designed to account for predator-prey relationships when managers determine acceptable levels of menhaden fishing mortality. Striped bass plays a particularly important role in that modeling.
That means the management system does not treat every menhaden left uncaught merely as unused commercial yield. A portion of the population is explicitly being considered in the context of its ecological function.
The distinction is important because arguments over menhaden are sometimes framed as a choice between commercial harvest and ecosystem needs, even as the commercial fishery harvests a low percentage of the overall menhaden biomass. The scientific management framework Dr. Latour described attempts to account for both.
The larger message of Dr. Latour’s presentation was that uncertainty should not be confused with evidence for one side or the other.