WASHINGTON — June 17, 2026 — A new post from One Angler’s Voyage by author Charles Witek takes a hard look at the recently launched Forage Fish Campaign and raises serious questions about the accuracy of its advocacy. While acknowledging that forage fish are ecologically important and deserve careful, science-based management, Witek argues that the campaign’s public messaging crosses the line from conservation advocacy into distortion by implying that forage fisheries have “collapsed” commercial fisheries coast-wide without providing data to support that claim.
The post is especially critical of a Forage Fish Campaign video that links menhaden boats, pair trawling, and forage fish harvests to the decline of a wide range of species, including sturgeon, flounder, marlin, sharks, bluefin tuna, weakfish, striped bass, and Atlantic halibut. As Witek explains, many of those species declined because of direct overfishing, bycatch, habitat loss, recruitment problems, or other documented causes—not because of any proven shortage of forage fish. In several cases, the post notes that the campaign’s claims are factually wrong, misleading, or unsupported by the science.
The central message is clear: forage fish conservation is important, but it is undermined when advocates rely on exaggerated claims, emotional appeals, and inaccurate graphics instead of the best available data. By calling out the Forage Fish Campaign’s misleading narrative, Witek argues that responsible fisheries advocacy must be grounded in facts—not public relations tactics that may ultimately damage the credibility of legitimate conservation efforts.
The following is an excerpt from One Angler’s Voyage:
Because forage fish are unquestionably important, it didn’t come as a particular surprise when I learned of the formation of a new organization calling itself “The Forage Fish Campaign.” According to its web page,
“The Forage Fish Campaign is a united coalition of captains, business owners, recreational anglers, and small-boat commercial fishermen.
“We’re concerned about the health of our coastal communities—and we’re fighting back.
“We’re engaging at the local, state, and federal levels to address the root of the problem: not our hard-working Americans—but industrial exploitation of our shared resources.”
That all sounds fine. There is a list of folks who have signed up as members, some of whom I know, many of whom I don’t. But I tend to get very nervous when I hear the word “campaign,” and here’s why: I believe that fisheries management ought to be based on the best available data. Sometimes that data isn’t available, and in such case, it’s entirely appropriate to worst-case the uncertainties, and take a more precautionary approach, but to the extent that the data is there, it ought to drive the decisions.
But that’s not exactly how “campaigns” function, because data and statistics are boring. Instead, campaigns are all about public relations, about catching the public’s attention, appealing to their emotions in an attempt to gain their support. And often, when people do that, the truth can be sacrificed for a more appealing story line.
And that’s what seems to have happened here.
“OVERHARVESTING OF FORAGE SPECIES HAS COLLAPSED COMMERCIAL FISHERIES COAST-WIDE”
Really? Which fisheries would those be? And what data did they have to support that claim of collapse?
So, the next time, I watched the video with the sound on, and heard the narrator, a New York charter boat captain and commercial fisherman, say,
“Used to go out in the fall, from deep in the heart of Raritan Bay, OK, towards Keyport, all the ways to Fire Island, there was bunker. Like 30 miles of bunker. Where are they today? I think it’s pretty obvious to say that the lion’s share of the bunker are being harvested by the bunker boats. The scale of their operation is enormous. The impact they’ve had is unbelievable. You could just talk to any fisherman, what’ll they say: “Oh, fishin’s terrible. Oh, there’s no bait. No bait!”
That might sound heartfelt, and some might even find it convincing, but it is not exactly the sort of hard science that should be underlying fisheries management decisions, yet when paired with video of a menhaden reduction boat setting nets, it probably is effective “campaign” material.