October 16, 2026 – The Menhaden Fisheries Coalition is challenging an October 9 congressional letter, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Representative Sarah Elfreth (D-Md.), urging the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) to impose additional restrictions on Atlantic menhaden fishing before critical Chesapeake Bay research has been completed.
The proposed restrictions threaten a predominantly minority, unionized workforce whose families have depended on the Reedville, Virginia fishery for generations. For more than a century, the industry has helped sustain Virginia’s Northern Neck communities, providing jobs that support families and send children to school and college. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400 has documented the importance of these jobs, including in a video featuring the fishermen themselves.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) has raised concernsabout the disproportionate consequences of further restrictions for African American workers, union families and rural communities, calling for environmental stewardship and sound science alongside economic justice.
Ocean Harvesters and Omega Protein’s Reedville operations provide approximately 250 to 300 well-paying jobs with benefits. A review by the ASMFC’s own Committee on Economics and Social Sciences cites estimates of more than 500 full- and part-time reduction fishery jobs in Maryland and Virginia, including hundreds in Northumberland County. It also warns that further restrictions could threaten the viability of the entire Reedville operation.
The future of the menhaden fishery, and the families who depend on it, requires a healthy Chesapeake Bay. Nobody has a greater stake in protecting the Bay than the fishermen and processing workers whose livelihoods depend on it. The fishery has worked with regulators and scientists, adjusted its fishing practices, complied with regulatory harvest limits and supported new research to improve management.
The Virginia Institute of Marine Science confirms that scientists lack sufficient data to determine adult menhaden abundance or survival in the Chesapeake Bay. And there is no scientifically established Bay-specific harvest threshold or validated adult abundance index demonstrating that commercial fishing has depleted menhaden to an unsustainable level. Virginia has committed $2 million over two years to new Chesapeake Bay menhaden research. Senator Van Hollen helped secure another $2.5 million in federal funding for a Bay-specific menhaden survey. Yet he is now leading an effort to impose additional restrictions before the research he helped fund produces results.
Participants in the fishery are members of the Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS), a member of the National Science Foundation’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers program, and contributed financially to its Chesapeake Bay menhaden research roadmap. The roadmap identifies research needed to establish a scientifically defensible Bay harvest cap. The fishery is actively cooperating with researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as they develop that roadmap.
The congressional letter points to osprey breeding problems and declining Maryland bait landings as evidence of menhaden scarcity. Researchers have documented serious osprey reproductive problems, but have not established that commercial menhaden harvest caused them or that restricting the fishery would improve reproduction. Declining bait landings likewise do not establish declining Bay-wide abundance. Maryland fisheries scientists reported that explaining a recent decline in a local menhaden index through increased harvest would require an implausibly large increase in landings, suggesting other explanations, including migration, should be considered.
Maryland’s own Department of Natural Resources reported in October 2025 that juvenile Atlantic menhaden and bay anchovies were widespread in the Chesapeake Bay for the third consecutive year. The agency’s annual juvenile fish survey documented more than 36,000 fish representing 55 species. The survey does not measure adult abundance, but its findings challenge sweeping claims of Bay-wide scarcity.
The lawmakers call for ecosystem-based management, but the ASMFC already adopted ecological reference points (ERPs) in 2020, following years of work among the commercial fishery, recreational fishing interests, conservation organizations and scientists. Since 2021, those reference points have guided catch limits by accounting for the menhaden needed as prey. Striped bass was selected as the focal predator because the model found it most sensitive to menhaden harvest. The ASMFC’s 2025 ecosystem review also included osprey in the supporting full ecosystem model. The lawmakers have not explained why further restrictions would achieve benefits beyond this existing ecosystem-based system, or why it is inadequate.
Major recreational and conservation organizations helped advocate for the adoption of this system and publicly praised it when the ASMFC approved it. In an August 5, 2020 announcement, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership President Whit Fosburgh called it a “landmark decision” and “a new era in fisheries management.” The American Sportfishing Association welcomed predator-sensitive quotas as “the science-based management we look for.” Coastal Conservation Association Maryland applauded “a more holistic approach,” and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation called the decision a “significant step” in science-based fisheries management. The Marine Retailers Association of the Americas also endorsed the new approach. Their support explicitly extended to birds: a July 2020 coalition letter urging the ASMFC to adopt the reference points identified ospreys, bald eagles, common loons and brown pelicans among the species the new approach was intended to protect.
The ASMFC’s own ecological reference point analysis found that even ending all menhaden fishing would not, by itself, rebuild striped bass to its biomass target; sustainable recreational and commercial striped-bass fishing remains essential. And the ASMFC’s April 2025 Chesapeake Bay review analyzed eight datasets covering 298,232 striped bass and found, using Fulton’s Condition Factor, that the sampled fish “are not starving and would be considered healthy.” Their body condition does not directly measure menhaden abundance, but it provides strong evidence against widespread striped-bass starvation.
The signers of the congressional letter were misled into believing that Atlantic menhaden are overfished. The facts are clear: according to the ASMFC’s latest assessment, Atlantic menhaden are not overfished, and overfishing is not occurring. The Commission already reduced the coastwide catch limit by 20% for 2026. The Atlantic menhaden purse seine fishery is certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). Whole Foods Market, an MSC partner since 1999, describes it as the world’s leading certification program for sustainable wild-caught seafood, involving independent review of fish populations, ecosystem impacts and responsible fishery management.
The existing Chesapeake Bay harvest cap was never based on a scientifically quantified biological threshold. During a May 2008 congressional hearing, then-ASMFC Executive Director Captain John “Vince” O’Shea reportedly described the cap as established “in response to a political problem” and said “there was not a science basis for the Cap,” as documented in published accounts of his testimony. His written testimony describes the cap as a precautionary response to public concern. In 2018, then-ASMFC Chairman James “Jim” Gilmore Jr., responding to Virginia’s appeal of the reduction to 51,000 metric tons, stated that “Leadership agrees the Amendment does not provide sufficient evidence to support such claims” — referring specifically to the argument that lowering the cap was necessary to protect the Bay as a nursery area. His statement is also reflected in the ASMFC’s published proceedings.
The lawmakers have not established that further restricting this fishery would produce those environmental benefits. The ASMFC should reject further Chesapeake Bay cap cuts and mandatory seasonal allocations until the research can establish their necessity and likely benefits. Hundreds of working families should not pay the price for restrictions unsupported by completed Bay-specific science.
Congressional signatories: The published letter bears the signatures of Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and Representatives Sarah Elfreth (D-Md.-3), Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.-6), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C., at-large delegate) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.-3). The accompanying press release also identifies Representative April McClain Delaney (D-Md.-6), although her signature is absent from the published letter.
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.