Regulators voted on 5 August to open the Chesapeake Bay menhaden cap to public comment, and the fight over how many of the Bay's forage fish the Reedville purse seine fleet should be allowed to take is now everybody's argument to have.
Draft Addendum II, released for comment by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, sets out options rather than a verdict. They range from leaving the 51,000 metric ton Chesapeake Bay reduction fishery cap alone to halving it, tying it automatically to future changes in the coastwide total allowable catch, and forcing Virginia to break the cap into seasonal quota periods so the harvest is not concentrated into a short window.
The seasonal piece is what pound net fishermen care about most. Small-scale operators in Maryland, Virginia and the Potomac say their late-summer catches, normally the peak, have fallen sharply, and they blame interception by the industrial fleet before menhaden migrate up the Bay. Conservation groups have made common cause with them.
The board has been slow to get here. It cut the coastwide catch limit by 20 percent in October 2025 without touching the Bay cap, then in May postponed the vote on this very document and set up a work group instead.
"This is a frustrating delay," Chesapeake Bay Foundation forage campaign manager Will Poston said after that May meeting. "Despite this setback, if the ASMFC acts in August it could still put new measures in place by 2027 to protect menhaden. Both ASMFC and Virginia must act without further delay to protect this sensitive estuary, or risk further damage to an ecosystem that so many livelihoods depend on."
"Ospreys continue to tell us something is wrong. The science clearly demonstrates that declining menhaden numbers are driving this crisis. Virginia needs to listen," he said.
"Ultimately, decision-makers must pause reduction fishing inside the Bay until menhaden research is completed," Poston said. "Pausing reduction fishing in the Bay is the safest option to protect current and future jobs, promote healthy and productive Bay wildlife and fisheries, allow more menhaden to mature, and safeguard this struggling estuary."
Ocean Harvesters, which supplies Omega Protein's Reedville plant, opposed releasing the draft. Its objection is that the addendum's Statement of the Problem never establishes the problem. The commission concedes in the document that sufficient scientific data do not currently exist to characterise menhaden abundance and distribution inside the Bay or the effect of fishing pressure on it.
Nor has the commission's Menhaden Technical Committee resolved the so-called gauntlet theory. For 2023 it found Maryland pound net catch rates in the back half of the year were generally equal to or above the recent average, suggesting little influence of the reduction fishery on pound net catches. The 2024 numbers showed a different pattern, but the committee could not establish cause and effect.
Virginia's commissioner raised the timing at the meeting itself. "Without that complete picture, without the proper Bay-specific data, I feel like we are putting the cart before the horse instead of availing ourselves to the upcoming studies and data that could finally guide us," Adele McClure said.
"We finally got that funded in Virginia at $4.5 million," McClure said. "We have three studies, and this could guide us in the context of good science, which is good for both the public, for union workers, and the fisheries."
The research she means is under way. Virginia has put $2 million over two years into a Virginia Institute of Marine Science menhaden programme studying abundance, movement, predator consumption and the timing and location of commercial effort. The Science Center for Marine Fisheries has funded a separate roadmap with VIMS, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and NOAA to define what a defensible Bay cap would require.
The fishery also argues the draft leaves out the ASMFC economics committee's warnings: structural unemployment, a minimum operating volume the Reedville plant needs to run at all, and the risk that a deep enough cut closes it. The plant is the town's employer, and the workforce is unionised and majority African American.
The cap has already been cut three times. Addendum III set it at 109,020 metric tons, Amendment 2 dropped it 20 percent to 87,216 tons in 2012, and Amendment 3 took it to 51,000 tons in 2018.
Comment runs through the autumn, with hearings scheduled before the board takes up final approval at its annual meeting. Any change lands in 2027 at the earliest.