October 8, 2025 — Environmentalists are calling on New York state lawmakers to save the horseshoe crab.
October 6, 2025 — In August, the Trump administration revoked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for Maryland renewable energy infrastructure projects.
The Maryland Offshore Wind Project and the Maryland Solar for All initiatives took significant blows after President Donald Trump cancelled grants for renewable projects across the nation.
Trump has described wind and solar as “expensive and unreliable energy sources,” seeking instead to promote domestic fossil fuel production.
Since the onset of his administration, Trump has signed 15 executive orders shifting federal policy away from renewable energy initiatives toward more traditional energy sources such as oil and coal.
October 3, 2025 –Escalating vessel flow in New York waters has coincided with an alarming spike in humpback whale mortalities, underscoring a mounting hazard.
A 2024 study headed by Lesley Thorne, the dean of research at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, pointed to post-pandemic shifts in trade routes favoring the East to the West Coast and new transits along coastal routes adjacent to PANYNJ as the driving factors behind this surge.
October 3, 2025 — The Eastern Shore’s congressman said he believes the Trump White House likely will be working to halt a proposed wind farm off the coast of Ocean City after reevaluating its permits.
Federal officials came to Ocean City last week for a rare face-to-face meeting with local leaders and commercial watermen to discuss long-running concerns about the proposed US Wind offshore project.
Congressman Andy Harris (R-1st) hosted the meeting at Sunset Grille in West Ocean City, where a representative from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration met with stakeholders.
“I think they were very happy to hear that the officials from NOAA were cognizant of their concerns, and I think the officials who were there agreed with them that the offshore wind project likely would do permanent damage to the commercial fishery,” he said.
October 1, 2025 — If you are a New Jersey commercial fisherman, or a shoreside business for commercial fishing, you can be compensated for any negative outcomes of the construction and operation of Empire Wind.
Empire Wind is the first wind farm to be built off New Jersey; it is being built 19 miles off Long Branch. Currently, they are about halfway done with construction, the company says. Empire Wind is owned by the Kingdom of Norway, a majority shareholder in Norwegian renewable energy company Equinor.
“Empire Wind is continuing to work with the fishing community to avoid and mitigate any project impacts,” said Empire Wind. “A fisheries compensation program has been established to provide compensation to commercial and charter/for hire fishermen along with shoreside businesses that have been economically impacted by construction and operations activities.”
September 29, 2025 — Virginia holds the distinction of being the largest East Coast state for seafood catch volume and the third-largest producer of marine products in the nation, surpassed only by Alaska and Louisiana.
This is largely tied to Reedville, Va. having historically been the fifth largest “volume of catch” commercial fishing port in the United States, and home to Omega Protein, Inc. and its fishing partner Ocean Harvesters.
The recent news that Ocean Harvesters is adding a $9 million menhaden vessel, the 165-foot F/V Tangier Sound, to its fishing fleet is sending a message that Ocean Harvesters, Omega Protein Inc. and Canadian parent company Cooke Inc. plan on fishing in the bay region well into the future.
The company has been dodging a barrage of opposition up and down the East Coast, ranging from Maryland 5th graders writing letters to the firm to “stop killing ospreys,” to opponents throwing blocks into nets. Tactics have included a jet skier interrupting net sets, protest boats attempting to block the fishermen, and environmental groups alleging that overfishing of menhaden is depleting osprey and striped bass populations.
A lawsuit in federal court for the Southern District of New York alleging that Cooke Inc. had been illegally fishing in U.S. waters because the boats are owned by a Canadian firm was dismissed in January 2025, allowing Ocean Harvesters to continue to fish.
The jet ski incident occurred in September 2023 and brought national attention to the debate, prompting Virginia legislators to pass a “right to fish” law to protect menhaden crews and commercial fishing watermen from harassment.
During a Sept. 15 tour of Omega Protein’s fish meal and oil plants and the new vessel, including a 45-minute ride on Tangier Sound and a three-hour classroom style seminar, Ocean Harvesters defended why reduction menhaden fishing should continue on Chesapeake Bay.
Ocean Harvesters’ CEO Monty Diehl addressed each issue with detailed graphic presentations aimed at countering growing opposition from environmental groups such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, as well as a swelling waterfront population whose changing demographics have no ties to the bay’s seafood or maritime culture.
Virginia has a small purse net bait recreational fishery that catches menhaden as well as the larger “reduction” fishery, so named because of how its catch is processed for omega fish oils, meal and related products. It is the only large menhaden reduction fishery remaining on the East Coast. The reduction fishery was founded in 1867 by Elijah Reed who brought the modern day pogy (menhaden) fishery to Virginia from Brooklin, Maine. Reedville is named after Elijah Reed and a monument in the town square memorializes that history.
September 29, 2025 — For the second year in a row, Maryland’s top delegates to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) claimed menhaden were absent from Maryland’s upper Chesapeake Bay, blaming Virginia’s commercial fishermen for intercepting the fish. Yet within weeks of their irresponsible statements, tens of thousands of menhaden turned up dead in a series of massive fish kills in Baltimore Harbor, directly contradicting their testimony.
At the August 7, 2025 ASMFC Atlantic Menhaden Management Board meeting, Maryland Department of Natural Resources Fisheries Director Lynn Fegley and veteran waterman Russell Dize painted a bleak picture. About menhaden, Fegley told fellow commissioners that “they just are meeting maybe an outsized gauntlet” of concentrated harvest and “are in the Bay … but they were not where we are,” warning of “lower availability” and “intensive effort” that she said was “creating less escapement for these fish to get through to these small-scale gears.” Dize reinforced the point, saying, “There’s a reason why the menhaden aren’t coming in the Bay, and we need to find [it].”
These 2025 comments closely echoed their testimony a year earlier. At the August 2024 ASMFC summer meeting, Dize flatly asserted, “In Maryland, this year we have no menhaden, none… One half a bushel, Maryland has no menhaden,” while Fegley added, “There are no menhaden in Maryland. The artisanal stationary gears that Maryland watermen fish are not capturing bait for our crab fisheries.”
Yet in both years, nature quickly told a different story.
Baltimore Fish Kills Prove Menhaden Are Present
Just weeks after the 2025 meeting, Baltimore experienced three major fish kills, each comprised largely of menhaden. According to the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), about 61,000 fish died on August 22, at least 120,000 on August 28, and another 25,000 on September 24 from Canton to Locust Point (CBS Baltimore). Eyewitness posts on Reddit and YouTube confirm that menhaden were the species involved.
Blue Water Baltimore’s Leanna Frick told WBAL Radio, “One silver lining is that if there aren’t fish in the harbor, you don’t see them in a fish kill … there are a lot of menhaden in the harbor, which are food species for other animals.”
The same pattern emerged after the 2024 ASMFC meeting. In early September 2024, about 24,000 dead menhaden surfaced in Baltimore Harbor; coverage of the fish kill included Chesapeake Bay Magazine, What’s Up? Media, and National Fisherman. This was followed in October 2024 by a Maryland DNR juvenile striped bass survey reporting near-record menhaden abundance, contradicting the commissioners’ “no menhaden” statements.
Blaming Virginia Fishermen While Overlooking Home Waters
Fegley and Dize have repeatedly suggested, absurdly, that Virginia’s menhaden reduction fleet, comprised of just six fishing vessels, is intercepting all the fish before they reach Maryland. But environmental experts point to Maryland’s own water-quality failures as a more direct culprit. The EPA has found zero progress on stormwater runoff, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Gussie Maguire, who warned that “pollution from stormwater has outpaced any management improvements due to increased development pressure and more intense rainfall from climate change” (What’s Up? Media).
National Fisherman likewise reported Maguire’s statement that “Maryland’s failure to adequately conduct stormwater management means pollution continues to degrade the waterway,” compounding problems for wildlife and fisheries (SeafoodSource / National Fisherman).
Bottom line: For two consecutive years, Maryland’s own ecological events and scientific surveys have contradicted their ASMFC delegates’ dishonest narrative that menhaden are absent. While Maryland delegates blame Virginia fishermen, the state’s unaddressed water-quality crisis continues to have negative effects on the menhaden in their waters, which the fish kills and surveys demonstrate are present in force.
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.
September 26, 2025 — Many years ago, all fish were managed by politicians. The basic rule was that you could catch whatever you wanted, in whatever numbers that you wanted, of whatever size that you wanted, and you could do what you wanted with the fish—eat them, sell them, give them away, feed them to the tomatoes, or dump them back in the bay—because no law said otherwise.
Sometimes, someone would start to worry that a stock of fish wasn’t doing too well, or decided that some sort of net was killing too many fish (or, perhaps, interfering with another sort of net), or maybe one group of people decided that another group of people were killing fish that the first group wanted for themselves. Whatever the issue, and whoever the concerned group might be, the only way to change the status quo was to go to the state (or very, very rarely federal) legislature, and convince the politicians to pass a law imposing a bag limit and/or a minimum size, or outlawing a particular gear, or to have a species declared a “gamefish” so that commercial fishermen couldn’t kill any of them anymore, and anglers could kill all of them instead.
It was a difficult, time-consuming process, and the results often weren’t very good, because laws were too often passed based on emotion, or because a particular group of fishermen wanted all of the fish for themselves, rather than being based on sound science and a coherent fisheries management policy.
Even the legislators eventually recognized that, although they held the ultimate management authority, they generally didn’t know all that much about fish, and both the public and the resource were usually better off if they delegated management authority to fisheries professionals who had the expertise needed to conserve and manage fish stocks.
That didn’t mean that the politicians were completely out of the picture—they still could legislate management measures if they wanted to—but it did mean that fisheries management measures were generally based on something more than largely uninformed opinion, and that any regulations that were put in place had to be based on facts, and were not merely “arbitrary and capricious” actions based on some people’s whim.
For the most part, and for most people, the administrative approach to fisheries management works a lot better than the legislative one, but for those who are trying to do something that’s a little outside the mainstream, and maybe unsupported by any sort of data or objective facts, management by politician rather than by professional fisheries experts is still the preferred way to go.
September 23, 2025 — Fate brought Mark Vrablic to Wanchese, N.C., at a young age. He grew up in the Etheridge family – more specifically, he grew up in the Willie R. Etheridge Seafood Co. Established in 1936, the Etheridges’ fish company has seen decades of history in southeast and Mid-Atlantic fisheries.
On a hot August afternoon, Vrablic, now manager of Etheridge Seafood, is sitting upstairs in his office, contemplating the past and the future and how he can help keep the North Carolina commercial fishing industry alive and healthy. “I ain’t got time, buddy,” he says when I first arrive. “Come back when I got some boats in and I’m in a better mood.”
But Vrablic is always ready to fight for the industry he’s given his life to. As soon as he answers one question, he’s engaged and telling the story of change on the Wanchese waterfront, a story he hopes the Willie Etheridge Seafood Company will survive.’
September 22, 2025 — The first American-made offshore wind installation vessel is ready to work, just as the Trump administration is making moves to shut the industry down.
The Charybdis, a turbine installation ship named for the sea monster from Greek mythology, arrived at Portsmouth Marine Terminal in Virginia last week. The $715 million vessel is set to begin erecting turbines next month at the country’s largest marine wind farm, named the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.
The Charybdis’ arrival marks a significant logistical and symbolic milestone for the U.S. offshore wind sector at a moment when the industry is under siege from President Donald Trump.