Saving Seafood

The Shrimp Industry’s Jumbo Problem

November 13, 2026 — Late last year, Louisiana Republican John Kennedy stood on the floor of the US Senate to inveigh against the evils of foreign shrimp and space aliens. Kennedy was standing in front of a placard bearing a still photo from the famous scene in Alien where the title creature bursts forth from John Hurt’s chest. The senator told his colleagues (and at least one impressively stone-faced Senate page) that if they didn’t stick to American-caught shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, they might well suffer a similar fate. “This is what you could end up looking like if you eat some of the raw, frozen shrimp being sent to the United States by other countries,” Kennedy said. “Even if it doesn’t turn you into the alien if you eat this stuff, I guarantee you will grow an extra ear.”

There’s no evidence that imported shrimp has given anyone a new appendage or faced off against Sigourney Weaver, but Kennedy was alluding to a real issue. Early in July 2025, inspectors at the Port of Los Angeles discovered traces of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope, in a shipment of shrimp from a processing plant in Cikande, Indonesia. They halted and, eventually, destroyed the shipment, from importer PT Bahari Makmur Sejati, better known as BMS Foods. Astonishingly, according to records reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek, US Customs and Border Protection had allowed BMS to continue importing shrimp through other American ports for months afterward, including for several weeks after the first in a series of BMS shrimp recalls issued by the US Food and Drug Administration. By the start of last fall, Customs had reversed course, but by that point, affected shrimp had already made it to store shelves.

Eventually, BMS shrimp were recalled from grocery stores across the country, affecting almost every major retailer in some way. If you noticed an empty display at your local Walmart or Kroger around that time, that’s why. BMS, Indonesia’s largest shrimp exporter, didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. Customs referred questions to the FDA, which declined to comment beyond the text of its first recall. “All containers and product testing positive or alerting for Cs-137 have been denied entry into the country,” the FDA said in that announcement. Nathan Rickard, a trade lawyer who reviewed the government’s inspection records, describes its conduct as inconsistent and unprecedented. The FDA would be “hard-pressed to explain how they knew that that stuff that came in wasn’t contaminated,” Rickard says. “Nobody ever checked it.”

Read the full article at The Fern

Atlantic Croaker Benchmark Stock Assessment Finds Northern Stock Depleted but Not Overfished and Southern Stock Not Overfished Nor Experiencing Overfishing

November 13, 2026 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Commission’s Sciaenids Management Board received the results of the 2026 Atlantic Croaker Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report, which indicate the northern stock of Atlantic croaker (New Jersey through Cape Lookout, North Carolina) is depleted but not experiencing overfishing, while the southern stock (south of Cape Lookout, North Carolina through Florida) is not overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

 
“The Benchmark Stock Assessment is a considerable advancement in our understanding of Atlantic croaker spawning stock biomass and stock status which was able to determine a clearer dividing line between the northern and southern stocks for the first time. It was also the first assessment that we have been able to successfully include shrimp trawl data, a major source of croaker removals, into the assessment model,“ said Board Chair Ben Dyar of South Carolina. “These data have been considered in past assessments but have never been incorporated into the stock status determination. The assessment was fully endorsed by an external panel of fishery scientists as the best scientific information available to manage the croaker resource, and I commend the members of the Technical Committee and Stock Assessment Subcommittee for their outstanding work on the Benchmark Stock Assessment.”

 

 
The two Atlantic croaker stocks were separately assessed using the Stock Synthesis (SS) population modeling framework. Stock status at the end of the assessment time series was determined from the three-year average (2021-2023) of fishing mortality (F) and spawning stock biomass (SSB) compared to their threshold levels. Two F thresholds were recommended for each stock to better understand sources of fishing pressure, one including F for all ages in the population (i.e., age-0+) and one including F for only ages older than age-0 (i.e., age-1+). F for age-0 includes mortality from shrimp trawl fleets that catch Atlantic croaker as bycatch while F for ages-1+ only includes mortality from recreational and commercial fisheries targeting Atlantic croaker. The assessment determined that the northern stock was depleted and not experiencing overfishing. The three-year average SSB at the end of the assessment was below the threshold and the three-year average Fs for both age ranges were below thresholds (see Figures below).
 
Stock status is described as depleted because it was not clear what caused the initial decline in abundance observed in the 2000s, though overfishing may have limited stock recovery following the initial decline. In addition to the unfavorable SSB status, individual growth has declined and length and age structure of the stock remains truncated relative to those observed in the past.
 
The southern stock was not overfished nor experiencing overfishing. The southern stock SSB is at time series highs, well above the threshold, and F rates are at time series lows, well below thresholds, at the end of the assessment time series. There are no troubling signs for the condition of the southern stock as this time.
 
The Commission’s Sciaenids Management Board accepted the Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report for management use and tasked the Technical Committee with additional analyses to evaluate possible paths forward for management of the northern stock.  
 
A more detailed description of the stock assessment results, as well as the Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report, will be available on the Commission website at https://asmfc.org/species/atlantic-croaker under News & Resources. For more information, please contact Tracey Bauer, FMP Coordinator, at tbauer@asmfc.org, or Jeff Kipp, Senior Stock Assessment Scientist, at jkipp@asmfc.org.