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.