October 30, 2026 — The U.S. Department of State has launched a new Fish Innovation Lab led by Mississippi State University’s (MSU) Global Center for Aquatic Health and Food Security (GCAHFS).
Starting with USD 8 million (EUR 7.2 million) in federal funding for the first year of the five-year award, the lab will focus on developing and scaling research-based solutions for improving aquatic food systems.
October 29, 2026 — The Norwegian energy company Equinor told investors and the media on Wednesday that its offshore wind project, Empire Wind, is approximately 80 percent complete but running behind schedule due to delays in U.S. shipbuilding. It said the delays were outside its control and that it now expects the wind farm off the coast of New York to deliver first power by mid-2027.
“On Empire Wind, despite the stop work orders, and all of that, we have been able to progress this and develop this, and it hasn’t really slowed us down much,” said CFO Torgrim Reitan during the investor conference call on October 28. He reported that top side construction is now expected to begin in late December, and the company expects first power during the first half of next year.
Equinor selected an installation system working with Maersk Wind, which built its installation vessel, Maersk Viridis, at Seatrium in Singapore. The massive 40,000 gross ton vessel had its own challenges in construction, with disputes with the shipyard. Those issues were resolved, and the vessel arrived off Pascagoula, Mississippi, in August. It is undergoing training and testing for its unique barge system.
October 23, 2026 — A University of Rhode Island professor with a global portfolio of work and a marine research associate in URI’s Coastal Institute are joining a multi-million dollar project funded by the U.S. Department of State, utilizing their expertise in international fisheries.
Professor Austin Humphries, Chair of URI’s Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Sciences, and Lauren Josephs M’17 in the University’s Graduate School of Oceanography are part of a team recently awarded a State Department grant in a project being led by Mississippi State University. The award is up to five years with up to $8 million in the first year.
A fisheries scientist, Humphries studies how ocean health and human well-being are linked. He’s led interdisciplinary research across Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. His research programs have attracted more than $150 million in collaborative funding. He and Josephs are teaming up to implement research that engages policy-makers to curb illegal fishing.
Humphries will lead the marine fisheries component of the project, as part of MSU’s Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish to advance research and innovation that strengthens global aquatic food systems while creating benefits for U.S. agriculture, industry, and food security. The project will be managed by MSU’s Global Center for Aquatic Health and Food Security and builds on the previous Fish Innovation Lab, which supported multidisciplinary research in 10 countries.
The new Fish Innovation Lab will focus on solutions that can move from development to practice, including opportunities to open international markets for U.S. products and technologies, and strengthen the protection of U.S. aquaculture from emerging disease and biosecurity threats.
Read the full article at The University of Rhode Island
October 21, 2026 — A bipartisan measure that aims to prevent seafood fraud is now federal law.
President Donald Trump signed into law Oct. 15, the Illegal Red Snapper and Tuna Enforcement Act, led by U.S. Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Katie Britt, R-Alabama, Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, and Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi.
The new law calls for a standard procedure to identify where red snapper and certain tuna species come from, including the development of a field test kit that can determine whether fish were caught in U.S. or foreign waters.
The process will allow law enforcement to intercept illegally caught or falsely labeled fish before they enter U.S. markets, officials said.
“Our new law will give law enforcement a powerful new tool to detect where ahi comes from, help prevent seafood fraud, and give consumers better, more accurate information on what they’re buying and eating,” Schatz said.
October 5, 2026 — U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi) has introduced a bill to raise tariffs on shrimp from Ecuador in a bid to discourage imports and support the domestic shrimp sector.
“Not much has changed since the federal government found that subsidized Ecuadorian shrimp contributed to material injury to the U.S. shrimp industry, except that Ecuador has only increased its shipments into the American market. As a result, Mississippi shrimpers and their counterparts across the Gulf face greater downward pressure on the prices they can get for their products,” Hyde-Smith said in a release. “The Ecuador Shrimp Tariff Act would work to level the playing field so that American shrimpers and processors can continue to compete and grow.”
October 1, 2026 — The following was released by the American Small Pelagics Network:
A September 22 Washington Examiner op-ed by Forage Fish Campaign Executive Director Whit Fosburgh continues to perpetuate the campaign’s false narrative. Fosburgh ignores the science governing the fisheries, generations of American working-waterfront history, and the U.S. fishermen and workers whose livelihoods depend on them.
The op-ed portrays Louisiana and Mississippi as Gulf outliers because they permit menhaden purse seine fishing, while not mentioning their history of successful menhaden management. The most recent Gulf menhaden stock assessment found the stock is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring. Louisiana regulates the fishery through coastal buffers, bycatch limits, reporting requirements and other operating rules and commissioned a 2024 season-long scientific study of purse seine bycatch. That study found total bycatch to be about what fisheries managers had expected and was followed by voluntary fleetwide gear changes intended to further reduce red drum mortality.
Like its Atlantic counterparts, Louisiana’s menhaden fishery also supports American fishermen, processing workers, shipyards, mechanics, welders, truck drivers and suppliers across the coast. The fact that Louisiana and Mississippi permit purse seine fishing is not evidence that the fishery is unsustainable, poorly regulated or contrary to American economic interests. The insinuation that Louisiana and Mississippi are acting irresponsibly unfairly discounts the science-based work of their fisheries professionals and is insulting to Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Tyler Bosworth, as well as Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and Department of Marine Resources Executive Director Joe Spraggins.
On the Atlantic Coast, menhaden are managed as both a harvested species and prey. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) uses ecological reference points designed to account for predator needs while allowing for a sustainable harvest. When the ASMFC adopted that system in 2020, Fosburgh himself called it a “landmark decision” and “a new era in fisheries management.”
The 2025 Atlantic menhaden assessment found the stock is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring. Revised natural mortality assumptions lowered historical stock estimates compared with prior assessments, but the assessment shows that biomass increased in recent years and the update did not show that managers had allowed years of excessive harvest. The ASMFC reported that the adopted 2026 catch level had a modeled zero-percent probability of exceeding the ecological overfishing threshold.
Fosburgh’s argument about the predator-prey relationship goes beyond the evidence. The ASMFC modeling shows that even eliminating all menhaden fishing would not, by itself, rebuild striped bass to their biomass target. In 2022–2023, recreational harvest and recreational release mortality accounted for 89 percent of striped bass removals. And an April 2025 ASMFC review of eight datasets covering 298,232 striped bass found that Fulton’s Condition Factor (a measure of fish body condition) remained above the 0.8 stress threshold and concluded the fish “are not starving and would be considered healthy.” This is an important distinction because individual striped bass can be in healthy body condition even while the stock remains below its biomass target. While striped bass feed opportunistically, eating many species in addition to menhaden, the evidence is consistent with the determination that the ecological reference points are leaving sufficient menhaden in the water for predators.
Recent Chesapeake Bay osprey research documents reproductive problems and food stress but does not establish commercial menhaden harvest as the cause. Lead author Dr. Bryan Watts has said his paper did not attempt to link poor osprey reproduction to menhaden harvest. The U.S. Geological Survey has also reported osprey reproductive problems elsewhere along the East Coast and in the Pacific Northwest.
The claim that menhaden are simply “worth more in the water” than when harvested is not an established economic fact. That argument was popularized by the 2012 Lenfest-funded Little Fish, Big Impact report, which relied on global ecosystem modeling rather than an economic valuation of Atlantic or Gulf menhaden, the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem or striped bass fishing. Subsequent peer-reviewed research challenged applying that conclusion as a general rule because predator responses to forage abundance vary by species, ecosystem conditions and spatial relationships.
Menhaden harvested within science-based limits create value through fishing, processing, wages, suppliers, aquaculture, animal and human nutrition, fish-oil products, and providing bait to recreational anglers and commercial fisheries. Recreational anglers may benefit from game fish feeding around concentrated menhaden schools, but that does not establish that every unharvested menhaden creates more economic value for Americans than a harvested one.
The op-ed’s Canadian-ownership argument is equally inaccurate. Omega Protein’s parent company, Cooke Seafood, is headquartered in Canada, but Atlantic menhaden vessels are operated by Ocean Harvesters, a U.S. company employing American union fishermen represented by UFCW Local 400. The Reedville, Virginia menhaden industry dates to the 1870s and has supported generations of Northern Neck families. His continued use of this framing is especially difficult to reconcile with the fact that he worked directly with these companies on these issues from 2015 to 2020 during the development of ecological reference points and has longstanding familiarity with the fishery, its management, and the companies involved. It is further evidence that Fosburgh and the Forage Fish Campaign are willing to present a misleading account in pursuit of their advocacy objectives.
Today the fishery provides family-supporting union jobs in a rural region where comparable employment can be difficult to replace. The operation employs one of the largest minority workforces in Northumberland County, and a 2023 collective bargaining agreement increased base pay, incentive rates and performance bonuses. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has also warned that proposed restrictions could disproportionately affect African American workers, union families and rural communities, citing labor, wages, race, rural economic opportunity and the dignity of work.
The claim that most of the fishery’s economic value leaves the country is also inconsistent with available sales information. It falsely recasts menhaden management as a story about Canada taking an American resource. For marine ingredients, Omega Protein reports that 70 percent of its 2025 sales went to U.S. customers, 83 percent remained within the United States, Canada and Mexico, and only 17 percent went overseas. The company also reports that no products made from Atlantic menhaden are supplied to Cooke operations. Of the menhaden harvested for bait, 85 percent is sold to domestic U.S. recreational and commercial customers, while just 15 percent goes to Canadian customers, primarily lobster harvesters. The sales data directly contradict this scare-tactic framing.
It is a false economic comparison to compare roughly 250 direct jobs at one Reedville processing facility with the entire economic footprint of recreational striped bass fishing. Fosburgh’s 250-job figure also does not comport with the employment figures cited by ASMFC economists reviewing the reduction sector, who referenced earlier estimates of approximately 519 full- and part-time jobs in Maryland and Virginia, including 347 in Northumberland County alone. Those economists also warned that plant economics can create a shutdown threshold at which employment losses become much larger than a simple proportional reduction.
Finally, the assertion that reduction fishing was “pushed out” of every Atlantic state except Virginia rewrites the industry’s history. The historical record documented by the ASMFC shows a decades-long consolidation of the Atlantic reduction industry shaped at different times by changes in menhaden distribution and abundance, plant consolidation, operating capacity, environmental requirements and individual plant closures. By the early 1970s, the remaining Chesapeake reduction plants were already located in Reedville; by 2006, Reedville was the sole Atlantic reduction processing location. Some states later restricted or prohibited purse seining, but those policies do not explain a consolidation already well underway before the later restrictions. The history of plant consolidation on both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts does not support the narrative that consolidation resulted from states rejecting an unsustainable menhaden fishery. Reedville, Virginia; Moss Point, Mississippi; and Abbeville and Empire, Louisiana, have all been longstanding centers of the menhaden industry, with processing infrastructure, skilled workforces and fishing expertise around which the industry developed and consolidated.
A struggling predator does not by itself prove a menhaden harvest problem. Canadian ownership of a processor does not make American fishermen Canadian. Industry consolidation does not prove states rejected an unsustainable fishery. And self-serving recreational advocacy to displace sustainable commercial fisheries is not an economic analysis.
At least one part of the Forage Fish Campaign’s presentation is accurate: it is a campaign, not an independent research effort or a neutral accounting of the facts. Its arguments repeatedly rely on selective framing and misleading characterizations to influence its audience rather than presenting the full record in context.
Atlantic and Gulf menhaden should continue to be managed through stock assessments, applicable state and interstate rules, targeted research and transparent economic analysis—not by false advocacy narratives that omit the management record, the science and the American workers tied to these fisheries.
About the American Small Pelagics Network
The American Small Pelagics Network represents fishermen, processors, suppliers, and coastal communities connected to fisheries such as menhaden, mackerel, herring, squid, and butterfish. ASPN advocates for sustainable fisheries management that supports critical fish species, while maintaining economic opportunities for fishermen and fishing communities.
July 28, 2026 — A handful of U.S. senators have asked the Department of the Treasury to issue sanctions on vessels that support China’s distant water fishing fleet, continuing a push from U.S. lawmakers to limit China’s commercial fishing and seafood sectors.
“The Chinese Communist Party is using its global distant-water fleet to conduct ecocide across at least three continents in both hemispheres. They kill endangered species by the hundreds and sharks, whales, and dolphins by the thousands, and have destroyed tens of thousands of acres of coral reefs,” U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in a statement. “Their fleet uses coerced laborers, who are subjected to physical abuse, malnutrition, overwork, and withheld pay. They could not conduct these activities without supply ships, including reefers, tankers, and floating bases. The U.S. should bolster our Maritime Domain Awareness capabilities to identify these vessels, and then we should use every available option to sanction and disrupt them.”
July 15, 2026 — A bipartisan coalition of Gulf Coast lawmakers is pushing to change a 73-year-old law that limits their states’ maritime boundaries to 3 miles offshore, potentially reshaping the regulation of local fisheries and generating billions of dollars in tax revenues from offshore energy and minerals leases.
Introduced by U.S. Rep. Mike Ezell, R-Miss., and a group of legislators that includes Reps. Troy Carter Sr., D-La., Clay Higgins, R-La., and Shomari Figures, D-Ala., the Offshore Parity Act would extend state waters from 3 nautical miles out to 9 – matching the long-held boundaries of Texas and Florida.
June 5, 2026 — A Mississippi state official testified in favor of expanding state fisheries control from three to nine nautical miles off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, a change proposed in the recently introduced Offshore Parity Act.
Advocates of the legislation claim it’s unfair that Texas and Florida are able to control fishing up to nine nautical miles off their coast, while the three other Gulf states only control three nautical miles due to the Submerged Lands Act of 1953. During a 3 June hearing held by the U.S. House Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries, Mississippi Department of Marine Resources Executive Director Joe Spraggins told lawmakers it was critical to his state’s fishers to expand state control.
May 1, 2026 — A new bipartisan bill in Congress aims to level the playing field for the Gulf Coast states by expanding offshore boundaries for Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Introduced by Rep. Troy Carter Sr., D-La., alongside Reps. Mike Ezell, R-Miss., Clay Higgins, R-La., and Shomari Figures, D-La., the Offshore Parity Act would extend state waters from three nautical miles out to nine– matching the boundaries long held by Texas and Florida.
Under current law, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama have jurisdiction over just three nautical miles offshore, a limitation dating back to the Submerged Lands Act of 1953. Texas and Florida were granted broader authority, a disparity that Louisiana unsuccessfully challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1969 case United States v. Louisiana.