Saving Seafood

ASMFC 84th Annual Meeting Supplemental Materials Now Available

November 4, 2026 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

Supplemental materials for ASMFC’s 84TH Annual Meeting are now available athttps://asmfc.org/events/2026-annual-meeting/ the following Management Boards.  The combined document of supplemental materials can be found at https://asmfc.org/resources/management-meeting-materials/2026-annual-meeting-supplemental-materials-november-2026/

American Lobster Management Board – Public Comment

ACCSP Coordinating Council – Recreational Technical Committee Meeting Summary from October 2026  

Horseshoe Crab Management Board – Advisory Panel Report

Shad & River Herring Management Board – Shad & River Herring Technical Committee Meeting Summary; River Herring Alternative Management Plan for South Carolina; American Shad Sustainable Fishery Management Plan for Maine;  American Shad Habitat Plan for Delaware River Basin Fish and Wildlife Management Cooperative; American Shad Sustainable Fishing Plan Request of Submission Extension for Delaware River Basin Fish and Wildlife Management Cooperative; Shad & River Herring Letter from New York Department of Environmental Conservation  

Atlantic Menhaden Management Board – Revised Public Comment Summary on Addendum II to Amendment 3 (the originally posted Part 2 also includes this revised summary);  Advisory Panel Review of Draft Addendum II and Quota Utilization; Update on Recent Menhaden Fishery Performance; Draft FMP Review for 2025 Fishing Year; Public Comment

Executive Committee – Revised Draft Agenda; Draft Meeting Summary from August 2026; ASMFC Coastal Fisheries Management Law Overview    

Commission Business Session – Draft 2027 Action Plan

ISFMP Policy Board – Revised Draft Agenda; Fishing Effort Survey 2026 Calibration  Factsheets for the Greater Atlantic Region and Southeast Region; ASMFC Stock Assessment Schedule; Public Comment

Habitat Committee – Commissioner Survey Identifies Habitat Priorities and Information Needs

Webinar Information

The Law Enforcement Committee, Habitat Committee and Atlantic Coast Fish Habitat Partnership Steering Committee have unique webinar links that are available as part of the individual committee materials. 

 

Meeting proceedings for all other boards/committees will be broadcast daily via webinar beginning Monday, November 9 at 9:30 AM and continuing daily until the conclusion of the meeting (expected to be 1:15 PM) on Thursday, November 12. To register for the webinar, please go to: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4458443143765348954 (Webinar ID:199-853-067)

 

If you are joining the webinar but will not be using voice over internet protocol (VoIP), you may also call in at +1 (213) 929-4212, access code 157-264-158. A PIN will be provided to you after joining the webinar. For those who will not be joining the webinar but would like to listen in to the audio portion only, press the # key when asked for a PIN.

 

Each day, the webinar will begin 15 minutes prior to the start of the first meeting so people can troubleshoot any connectivity or audio issues they may encounter. If you are having issues with the webinar (connecting to or audio related issues), please contact Chris Jacobs at 703.842.0790.

Meeting Process

Board chairs will ask both in-person and virtual board members if they wish to speak. In-person members can simply raise their hands at the meeting without logging on to the webinar, while virtual members will raise their hands on the webinar. The chair will work with staff to compile the list of speakers, balancing the flow of questions/comments between in-person and virtual attendees. The same process will be used for public comment. Depending upon the number of commenters, the board chair will decide how to allocate the available time on the agenda (typically 10 minutes) to the number of people who want to speak.

 

Public Comment Guidelines

To provide a fair opportunity for public input, the ISFMP Policy Board has approved the following guidelines for use at management board meetings: 

 

For issues that are not on the agenda, management boards will continue to provide opportunities to the public to bring matters of concern to the board’s attention at the start of each board meeting. Board chairs will ask members of the public to raise their hands to let the chair know they would like to speak. Depending upon the number of commenters, the board chair will decide how to allocate the available time on the agenda (typically 10 minutes) to the number of people who want to speak.

 

For topics that are on the agenda that have not gone out for public comment, board chairs will provide limited opportunity for comment, taking into account the time allotted on the agenda for the topic. Chairs will have flexibility in deciding how to allocate comment opportunities; this could include hearing one comment in favor and one in opposition until the chair is satisfied further comments will not provide additional insight to the board.

 

For agenda action items that have already gone out for public comment, it is the Policy Board’s intent to end the occasional practice of allowing extensive and lengthy public comments. Currently, board chairs have the discretion to decide what public comment, if any, to allow in these circumstances.

 

In addition, the following timeline has been established for the submission of written comments for issues for which the Commission has NOT established a specific public comment period (i.e., in response to proposed management action).

 

  1. Comments received three weeks prior to the start of a meeting week (October 19) will be included in the briefing materials.
  2. Comments received by 5 PM on Tuesday, November 3 will be included in supplemental materials.
  3. Comments received by 10 AM on Friday, November 6 will be distributed electronically to Commissioners/Board members prior to the meeting.

Respected Recreational Fishing Blogger Blasts Deceitful Forage Fish Campaign

September 8, 2026 — The following is an excerpt from a post, “Bunker Mentality,” by author Charles Witek from his recreational fishing blog One Angler’s Voyage. Mr. Witek is an attorney, fisheries consultant, and recreational fisherman. He has held a seat on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, served as president of the New York State Outdoor Writers Association, and represents New York on various fishery management bodies.

There are legitimate scientific arguments that can be made to reduce overall menhaden landings, including both the landings of the reduction fleet and the landings of the growing segment of the menhaden industry who supply menhaden as bait.

But that’s not the way the menhaden advocates are operating. Instead of focusing on the scientific arguments, they spend most of their efforts in making emotional appeals that revile the reduction fleet, with criticisms based not on hard data, but rather on the size of its vessels or the nationality of its customers.

Consider a group that calls itself “The Forage Fish Campaign.” Its web page declares that

“Industrial fishing vessels are stripping billions of pounds of menhaden, herring, mackerel, shad, and river herring from American coastal waters every year—collapsing ecosystems, destroying livelihoods, and shipping the profits overseas…

“Industrial fishing operations are extracting billions of pounds of menhaden, herring, mackerel, and shad every year from American waters. Not for food. Not for bait. The great majority is for industrial processing—ground into meal and oil, shipped overseas to feed foreign fish farms and factory livestock. [emphasis added]”

It ends with the declaration “This. Stops. Now.”

The message is clearly intended to foment public animosity toward the large-volume, low-value (per-pound) fisheries that typically target forage species, including menhaden. After all, they are “industrial fishing operations,” that ship their profits overseas, and often sell product to foreign fish farms and factory livestock operations.

What red-blooded American wouldn’t despise the sort of folks who do that?

Perhaps someone who actually understood biology and fisheries management.

From a biological standpoint, it makes no difference to a fish stock whether it is caught by a handful of “industrial” vessels, or by a relative multitude of small-scale fishermen. So long as the stock is not subject to overfishing—and the last stock assessment made it clear that menhaden are not—it doesn’t matter to the fish whether they are killed by a big net or a small one.

A menhaden killed by a tackle shop owner tossing a cast net is just as dead as one killed by a reduction boat. Its removal from the population has the same impact.

But the reduction boats are just bigger, more attractive targets for the advocates’ bile. Something that they hope they can convince people to hate.

The references to “shipping the profits overseas” and shipping fish overseas to be used as feed in “foreign” fish farms follows a similar logic. The idea is to convince people that the “industrial” fleet is engaged in activities that, at their core, are somehow un-American.

Of course, such comments ignore the fact that Ocean Harvesters is an American—not a foreign—company, and that the boats are crewed by American fishermen who spend their income from the fishery supporting American families, buying or renting American real estate, and patronizing American stores in their home towns.

And while most of the menhaden are shipped overseas, no one, other than some people trying to minimize trawler bycatch, seems concerned that the Alaskan walleye pollock trawl fishery—the largest single fishery in the United States, when measured by poundage caught—ships the majority of its product overseas (or that those 3 billion tons of pollock that are landed each year are caught by “industrial” boats).

That sort of anti-foreign rancor is generally saved for the menhaden reduction fleet.

Similarly, The Forage Fish Campaign seems bound to attack the reduction industry because the menhaden it catches are used “Not for food. Not for bait,” but rather for aquaculture and agricultural feeds, which again might be good for growing hostility against the reduction industry, but makes no logical sense.

After all, there aren’t many people in the United States who will want to use menhaden for food, and it’s not clear why using menhaden for bait—bait that is used to catch what are essentially luxury species such as lobster or blue crabs—is a higher and better use of the menhaden resource than using it to feed the Atlantic salmon imported from Canada or Norway or Scotland and eaten by millions of Americans, or using it to feed the birds raised on “factory livestock” farms to produce your kids’ chicken nuggets.

Once more, it’s all provocative language intended to create hostility toward a particular fishery, which makes no logical sense at all.

Read the full post at One Angler’s Voyage

American Icons: Reviving the River Herring

July 31, 2026 — As he watched the British bombarding Fort McHenry from a truce ship on the Patapsco River, inspiration struck Francis Scott Key. When the American flag was raised after 24 hours of explosive assault, Key wrote what would become “The Star Spangled Banner.” Our national anthem was born, along with our country’s obsession with fireworks.

But long before there were red rockets glaring in the sky, the Patapsco River had an equally impressive natural spectacle of its own. Every spring, it would turn silver with millions of river herring. The annual migration of these fish was a sight to behold in rivers up and down the East Coast of North America. In fact, here at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Maryland, Muddy Creek used to be called Herring Creek.

Emphasis on “used to.” In less than a century, river herring populations have dwindled by well over 90 percent. These fish have certainly seen better days, but recovery efforts are well underway. Scientists are fighting an upstream battle to protect what remains, using cutting-edge research and… bombs bursting in air?

Read the full article at the Smithsonian Magazine

ASGA: Striped Bass Accountability Requires More Than Blaming Menhaden

July 13, 2026 — The American Saltwater Guides Association has published a blog post urging its membership and the broader recreational fishing community not to avoid accountability by blaming the diminished striped bass population on a lack of one forage species—Atlantic menhaden—while ignoring the central problem that anglers are “killing more fish than are being born.”

ASGA makes clear that menhaden are critically important to the Atlantic ecosystem and that the organization remains committed to responsible menhaden advocacy. But the post also warns against reducing striped bass conservation to an oversimplified message that “more menhaden = more stripers.” As ASGA explains, “while stripers and bunkers are ecologically connected, their advocacy demands nuance,” and any group claiming that menhaden campaigns alone are the reason anglers are catching large striped bass this year is “a major disservice to striped bass advocates.”

The blog post also highlights what fishermen know from experience: striped bass are opportunistic predators. Anglers on ASGA’s Guide Post Podcast described striped bass feeding on squid, sand eels, river herring, hickory shad, mackerel, crabs, glass minnows, eels, and other forage species depending on season, geography, and conditions. Capt. Ray Jarvis put it plainly: “Striped bass eat everything.” He also cautioned that blaming striped bass declines on a single factor makes people believe “there’s a simple solution to this problem… but it’s not that simple.”

ASGA’s central point is an important one: blaming menhaden, climate change, seals, sharks, or any other single factor may be politically convenient, but it does not replace the need for accountability in striped bass management. As the post says, the harder truth is that “as a collective angling body we are killing more fish than are being born.” That is the conservation challenge that cannot be avoided.

Read the post here

MASSACHUSETTS: Before the herring return, Cape Cod needs people to count them

February 10, 2026 — On a still April morning, one of the most important things happening on Cape Cod is easy to miss unless you’re really looking. No crowds. No signs. Just narrow ribbons of water where silver flashes push upstream, muscle and instinct carrying river herring from the saltwater back to the ponds and wetlands where their lives began.

For decades, those fleeting migrations have told a quiet story about the health of the Cape’s ecosystem. Now, local researchers and conservationists say the story needs more listeners.

The Association to Preserve Cape Cod is recruiting volunteers for the 2026 river herring count season, a citizen science effort that relies on something everyone knows how to do: count. All it requires is people willing to show up consistently, watch carefully, and write down what they see.

The commitment is not a heavy lift, but the payoff is anything but lightweight.

“Ten minutes at a run, a few times a week, adds up to information we can use to track the run, spot problems, and see whether restoration work is paying off,” said Mike Palmer, an ecologist at the APCC who coordinates volunteer monitoring across the region.

Read the full article at the Cape Cod Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Herring Population Is Booming In Massachusetts

November 19, 2025 — It’s a plentiful year for River Herring in Massachusetts.

Daria Santollani is the senior engagement manager at the Mystic Watershed Association, the organization that tracks herring population and migration every year since 2012.

She told WBZ NewsRadio that this year, volunteers reported the highest number of herring passing through the Boston Harbor into the Mystic River, at nearly 815,000.

“It’s just amazing that the largest migration of herring in Massachusetts happens in the most urban watershed,” she said.

In the past, overfishing depleted the herring population. In 2012, the association reported the herring population was only around 21,052.

Read the full article at WBZ

Herring count shows more work needed to boost population

October 30, 2025 — Twenty years ago, Massachusetts banned harvesting river herring in an attempt to protect alewife and blueback herring.

Last year the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission released a stock assessment that determined herring populations are stable throughout the coast, including Massachusetts.

Mike Palmer coordinates an annual spring herring count for the Association to Preserve Cape Cod. He said we need to be doing more to help the population rebound.

Palmer said the spring 2025 count showed below-average returns on the Cape. Since then, continuing drought conditions have been tough on river herring that require sufficient river flows to return to the ocean in the fall.

Read the full article at CAI

MAINE: With improved fish passage, Maine is seeing a record number of river herring

July 8, 2024 — Scientists say many more alewives and blueback herring have made their way into Maine’s waterways this year — a recovery they attribute to dam removals and habitat restoration.

Sean Ledwin, the director of the Bureau of Sea-Run Fisheries and Habitat at the the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said several rivers are seeing strong runs again this year, after record counts in 2023.

Read the full article at Bangor Daily News

These fish are critical to New England, and they’re disappearing

July 14, 2022 — Hutchins, a habitat restoration biologist with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, lives and works on Cape Ann. Along with a small group of volunteers, he monitors the baby eels migrating upstream at Mill Brook between spring and fall. In a year, sometimes they’ll document well over a thousand elvers.

Half a century ago, fishermen harvested millions of pounds of American eels annually up and down the Atlantic Coast. By 2013, however, researchers estimated the population had dropped by half.

Experts suspect overfishing and coastal development have played a role in the decline, along with eutrophication — when nutrients from sewage and fertilizers choke the oxygen from ponds and streams.

Another fish fundamental to fresh and saltwater ecology is the river herring.

Alewives and bluebacks are migratory herring that range along the East Coast from Florida to Maine. Whereas eels are born in the ocean but live in freshwater, river herring live in coastal waters and only venture inland to spawn.

As with eel, river herring populations began to crash in the 1980s, coinciding with advances in commercial fishing techniques and new construction along the coast.

Massachusetts is home to about 3,000 dams, with many built in the 19th century for water power, reservoirs, or flood control.

“A dam in a river is like a blocked artery; it’s like a heart attack,” said Robert Kearns, a climate resiliency specialist at the Charles River Watershed Association. “It degrades the water quality behind it; reduces the dissolved oxygen which fish rely on to breathe and to live … and creates a habitat that’s better for invasive species.”

Beyond commercial fishing, a report by the American Sportfishing Association found saltwater sport fishing generates over $500 million dollars a year in sales, wages, and taxes in Massachusetts.

But amid the reality of human-made climate change, the future of the herring and the eels, on which so much depends, remains very much in question.

Read the full story at WBUR

ASMFC Begins Preparations for River Herring Benchmark Stock Assessment

April 14, 2022 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has initiated a benchmark stock assessment for river herring to be completed in the summer of 2023. River herring is the collective name for two closely related species, alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) and blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis), that return to rivers from Maine through Florida to spawn every year. The goals of the assessment are to evaluate the health of stocks along the Atlantic coast and inform management of these species. The Commission’s stock assessment process and meetings are open to the public, with the exception of discussions of confidential data. 

The Commission welcomes the submission of data sources that will contribute to the goals of the assessment. This includes, but is not limited to, data on abundance including run counts and surveys, stocking, biological samples (sex, maturity, age, weight, length), life history information (growth, fecundity, natural mortality, sex ratio, spawning history), stock structure (tagging data, genetics), mortality (predator diet, anthropogenic sources such as hydropower dams), and catch (harvest, discard, fishing effort). An essential need is data to inform the stock assessment of discards and bycatch in other directed fisheries (e.g. the Atlantic herring fishery). For data sets to be considered, the data must be sent in the required format, with accompanying description of methods, to the Commission by July 1, 2022.  

The Commission will hold a Data Workshop July 12-14, 2022 via webinar to review all available data sources for river herring and identify datasets to be incorporated in the stock assessment. The Data Workshop is open to the public. To register for the webinar, visit https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5539956829101821456. (Webinar ID 375-897-411).

For more information on submitting data, including the appropriate format, and/or attending the River Herring Data Workshop, please contact Katie Drew, Stock Assessment Team Lead, at kdrew@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.