Mark Robichaux, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is a fisherman and author.
For 15 years, I’ve launched my bay boat, the Bayou Belle, into Long Island Sound before sunrise, chasing striped bass like generations of coastal fishermen before me. But lately, the water feels empty. The surface no longer shimmers with baitfish. The gulls don’t dive. Everyone at the marina says the same thing: The stripers just aren’t here anymore.
The stripers didn’t vanish on their own. The food that sustains them went first.
Menhaden — also known as pogies or bunker — are small oily fish that feed nearly everything in the Atlantic. They are the foundation of the East Coast’s marine food web, fueling striped bass, bluefish, tuna, whales and seabirds. Yet each year, a single industrial operation hauls out hundreds of millions of pounds of them — not to feed humans but to grind them down into oil and meal for aquaculture and pet food, much of it for export.
Omega Protein, a U.S. subsidiary of Canada’s global seafood company Cooke Inc., contracts with an affiliated fleet of about 30 fishing boats along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico. Guided by spotter planes and GPS, these ships pull nets nearly four football fields long to trap the menhaden; in 2022, nearly 300 million pounds of the fish were essentially vacuumed out of the Atlantic. On the East Coast, the ships’ haul goes to Reedville, Virginia — home to the last menhaden-reduction plant on the Atlantic Seaboard.
Years ago, historian H. Bruce Franklin, author of “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” called menhaden exactly that. He was right. And if their decline continues, striped bass could be next to disappear — just as Atlantic cod once did.
Yet years-long efforts to prevent this vanishing have been weak and half-hearted at best. At its annual meeting last month, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a powerful body representing 15 states, voted to approve a 20 percent reduction in next year’s menhaden catch. On the surface, that sounds like progress. But it falls far short of what’s needed. Many scientists have called for cuts of 50 percent or more to support the recovery of striped bass, one of America’s most popular sportfish dependent on menhaden.
Instead of caution, the commission chose compromise. Citing the “socioeconomic impact” on reduction and bait fisheries, it made a decision that keeps mortality rates just under bureaucratic thresholds while pushing the ecosystem toward collapse.
Jason Schratwieser, president of the International Game Fish Association, put it plainly: “Menhaden fishing for reduction should be prohibited. Removing menhaden from the ecosystem and rendering it into animal feed or other industrial products … is a poor use of this vital resource.”
This isn’t a debate over red tape — it’s a fight over who controls the base of the Atlantic’s food chain: the public that depends on a healthy ocean or a private fleet that treats it like an industrial feedlot.
Omega Protein’s Reedville reduction plant might dominate the shoreline, but it doesn’t define the coastal economy. Recreational fishing drives about $140 billion in annual sales impacts and supports roughly 700,000 jobs in the United States. Along the Atlantic Coast, the striped bass fishery alone is reported to contribute more than $13 billion in economic value and to support more than 100,000 jobs.
Omega Protein’s dominance, however, is sustained not by biology but by politics. Although it employs fewer than 300 full-time workers, the company wields outsized influence in Richmond. Its lobbyists, including the powerhouse legal and public affairs firm McGuireWoods, have long worked both sides of the aisle — Republicans for their support of commercial interests and Democrats for their emphasis on union jobs — to block conservation efforts.
The depth of Omega Protein’s influence was clear when three efforts to fund independent menhaden science were defeated in Virginia’s General Assembly this year — derailed by the industrial fishing lobby. Even with evidence of osprey dying off, striper numbers down and crab numbers wavering, legislators refused to fund research “studying the ecology, fishery impacts, and economic importance of menhaden populations in the waters of the Commonwealth,” which their own scientific advisers said was essential.
Though menhaden migrate up and down the coast — from Nova Scotia to Florida — spawning offshore and maturing in estuaries such as the Chesapeake Bay, the right to harvest them is anything but evenly shared. The system treats them as a private stockpile for a single factory in one state.
Under the current system of catch maximums, Virginia controls more than 75 percent of the coastwide menhaden allocation, a figure locked in by the Chesapeake Bay’s status as a critical nursery as well as decades-old catch data that no longer reflect the fish’s migratory range or ecological importance. The other roughly 25 percent of coast-wide catch is allocated among the remaining states, but New England states receive only about 10 percent combined, even though they rely on menhaden to sustain local lobstermen, fishing boats, whale-watching and anglers.
Meanwhile, the Chesapeake Bay is in ecological distress. New research from the Center for Conservation Biology at William & Mary shows widespread osprey starvation in the bay and cites chick deaths as “a clear indicator of food deficit.” When menhaden disappear, everything built upon them — bass, birds and the bay’s identity — begins to crumble.
The same story is playing out in the gulf. This month, in a meeting packed with angry anglers, Louisiana’s Wildlife and Fisheries Commission voted to take steps to ease menhaden restrictions. The change, pushed by industry after it initially agreed to the limits last year, mirrors the Atlantic debate: small concessions to ecology wrapped in large giveaways to industry.
Sport fishermen have already made sacrifices. Along the East Coast today, an angler may keep just one striped bass — and only if it falls within a tight three-inch slot between 28 and 31 inches. Fisheries managers have only two levers: limit striped bass harvest or protect their food. So far, they’ve leaned hard on the first and barely touched the second.
The lessons from history are clear. Collapses don’t happen because we lacked information. They happen because we ignored it. That’s what doomed Atlantic cod. Now the same dynamic threatens the East Coast’s most iconic sportfish and the forage base that sustains it.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission still has time to change course. The path is straightforward:
- Cut the menhaden harvest in half, as scientists recommend.
- Ban industrial reduction fishing in Virginia’s nearshore and other nursery areas such as the Chesapeake Bay.
- Treat menhaden as a public trust — not a commodity.
If we refuse to do that, the next great American fishery collapse will not be an accident. It will be a choice.
And the silence in the Sound will spread.
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