September 15, 2026 — NOAA Fisheries has awarded USD 103 million (EUR 89 million) to support fisheries habitat restoration projects throughout the United States.
The funding will be distributed across 16 projects selected by NOAA Fisheries. The agency said it selected projects that restore habitat – or access to habitat – necessary for the nation’s fisheries.
September 14, 2026 — The Supreme Court will decide later this month whether to hear a lobster fisherman’s challenge to a government requirement that boats use electronic tracking devices. That case could have broad consequences for the American commercial fishing industry.
Maine lobsterman Frank Thompson filed a federal lawsuit against the head of his state’s marine resources department over a requirement that he install a GPS tracker on his boat to keep his fishing license.
In 2023, the state, where lobster fishing is a critical and historic industry, required all federally permitted lobstermen to do so to comply with a new U.S. rule aimed at data collection.
Thompson asserted that the monitoring constituted unreasonable search and seizure, but a federal appeals court denied his claim last year. He appealed to the Supreme Court, which is set to review the claim on Sept. 28.
September 14, 2026 — NOAA Fisheries is directing $103 million toward habitat restoration projects across the country, with several of the largest awards aimed at improving habitat for commercially important salmon, shrimp, oysters, and other species.
The agency announced Sept. 10 that it selected 16 projects for funding, ranging from salmon habitat work in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest to salt marsh restoration along the Gulf and Southeast coasts.
The funding is intended to restore wetlands, rivers, coral reefs, and other habitats fish rely on for feeding, spawning, and growth. NOAA said healthy habitat is essential to sustaining both commercial and recreational fisheries and the communities and industries that depend on them.
Demand for funding far exceeded what was available. NOAA received nearly 350 proposals requesting a combined $1.5 billion, more than 17 times the amount ultimately awarded.
September 11, 2026 — NOAA Fisheries has awarded $103 million in funding for 16 habitat restoration projects across the country. These projects will recover and sustain our nation’s fisheries by ensuring fish have access to high quality habitat.
By supporting America’s fisheries, these projects will “Make America Beautiful Again” through proactive, voluntary, on-the-ground collaborative conservation efforts. America’s abundant natural resources—including valuable commercial and recreational fisheries—are vital to our nation’s economy and culture, bolstering industries, jobs, recreation, and more.
Fisheries rely on healthy habitats like wetlands, rivers, and coral reefs as important areas to grow, eat, and reproduce. These projects will restore healthy habitat for fish across the country: from planting corals to rebuild reefs in the Caribbean, to reconnecting rivers for salmon, to restoring salt marsh for shrimp and oysters in the Gulf of America.
NOAA received many more applications than we could fund. The total demand from the nearly 350 proposals we received was $1.5 billion, more than 17 times the amount of funding available. The full list of funded projects can be found below.
September 10, 2026 — Thanks to the surge in Americans eating high protein diets and GLP-1-friendly foods, sales of tinned fish are soaring, according to new data.
The share of Instacart searches containing the word “protein” rose 12.7 percent in the first half of this year versus the first half of 2025, while searches for “fiber” jumped 26.4 percent. “Protein-maxxing” and “fiber-maxxing” – new terms coined by social media – are not happening in a vacuum, either, with GLP-1s contributing to the trend.
September 9, 2026 — U.S. states filed two lawsuits on Wednesday accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of illegally weakening the federal Endangered Species Act, a landmark law that has shielded the bald eagle and other wildlife from dangers posed by development.
The lawsuits by the Democratic attorneys general of 20 states and Washington, D.C. were filed less than two months after the Department of the Interior and the Department of Commerce announced final rules that could make it easier for developers, fossil fuel companies and others to disturb lands that environmental advocates say need protection from business interests.
Enacted by Congress in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has been credited with saving animals including the California condor, grizzly bear and humpback whale.
In one lawsuit, the states challenged a rule that narrowed the Endangered Species Act’s definition of “harm,” which had long included encroachments on habitats where endangered animals live.
The new rule, which the states called “a reversal of staggering proportions,” allows oil drilling, mining and other activities in those habitats so long as those activities are not “directed immediately and intentionally” against particular animals, even if they cause injuries or death.
In the other lawsuit, the states challenged two rules. One rule eliminates broad protections for newly threatened species unless the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service creates species-specific protections. The second rule requires the government to consider objections by businesses, such as potential economic burdens, before declaring areas as “critical habitats.”
“The Trump administration is trying to undermine the law, the will of Congress and the will of the people who overwhelmingly support protections for endangered species,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said at a press conference. “Instead of stewardship, this administration’s approach to our land, to our water is one of exploitation.”
September 9, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced another USD 6 million (EUR 5.2 million) in funding to expand processing capacity for invasive wild blue catfish, matching the amount made available in 2025.
“Under the leadership of President Trump, the USDA is actively implementing actionable and innovative solutions like this one that solve serious challenges,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in a release. “By investing in seafood processors, we can help our hardworking watermen remove invasive catfish from our waterways while strengthening the future of our rural communities.”
September 9, 2026 — The U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of giving the U.S. Department of Justice more tools and authority to crack down on international trade crimes, with lawmakers singling out Chinese exports.
“China has spent decades finding ways to undermine American workers and our economy. My bill will finally give the DOJ real tools to stop these blatant violations and ensure penalties are meaningfully enforced. Today’s bipartisan passage is a huge win for American workers and domestic manufacturing – let’s make it the law of the land ASAP,” U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) said in a release.
September 9, 2026 — The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) is planning a rebrand, which will involve changing its name to the National Seafood Association – a first since the organization’s founding,
NFI was founded in 1945, and for over 80 years has been advocating for the U.S. seafood industry. Throughout that time period, the organization’s areas of focus have gradually expanded from just U.S. fisheries to the wider supply chain, including things like aquaculture and processing.
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.