There’s a fight in the bay involving a small fish

Fishing in the Bay: What’s the Problem? Disenchantment from Virginia Rep. Lee Ware, a Republican Proponent of a Baymenhaden Policy

Environmentalists want the fishery to be completely banned in the bay. They worry that the population is in danger from being overfished.

“There were so many people who had a stake in this, who had been involved in the discussions over the course of a year,” said Virginia Del. Lee Ware, a Republican who proposed the bill. “And that was a keen disappointment, because it’s so important to the health and to the economy of the Chesapeake Bay, which itself is such a gem, in Virginia’s natural environment.”

The development of a $3 million plan for a study on the menhaden population and the impacts of the commercial fishery and menhaden policy was a collaborative effort by all sides in the issue.

Collecting data on the bay menhaden population would be expensive, including likely using the same spotter planes Omega does to conduct fish surveys. Latour said scientists also don’t know that much about the fish’s life cycle, which spans the East Coast, making it further difficult to study just the bay.

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He didn’t fault them for thinking about that. It’s difficult to determine with sufficient evidence. The things you need to know, we don’t know.”

But critics say those numbers, which track the Atlantic menhaden population along the entire East Coast, could obscure a more localized decline in the Chesapeake Bay.

“I’m pretty sure that we would all be celebrating if this were any other species,” said Rob Latour from the William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

The menhaden fishery stretches from Maine to Florida during the Civil War era. The plant is the last one left.

Omega says the industry is already tightly regulated, and that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission recently found that the full Atlantic menhaden population is not overfished.

But commissioners ultimately opted not to codify any new restrictions, instead reaching a deal with Omega to harvest less on days when there’s more beachfront activity, like holiday weekends during the summer.

Some new regulations were created because of the renewed public attention. A contentious public hearing in late 2022 stretched four hours with impassioned pleas from both sides.

The fishery used to be controlled directly by state lawmakers, making regulatory decisions highly political. It has been in the hands of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission since 2020.

Some local sport fishermen have taken to filming Omega’s operations on the water and posting videos to social media, complaining the industry is wasteful.

A series of industrial net tears in the summers of 2021 and 2022 caused a large quantity of dead menhaden to spill onto Virginia beaches, causing residents and tourists to see and smell the corpses.

In the past, there have been some clashes with recreational fishermen and opposition has increased in the last few years, due to concerns about the scarcity of fish.

Omega uses a fishing method called purse seine to harvest fish. The company sends spotter planes to scout for massive schools of menhaden from the air. The fishing vessels then surround the school with giant nets that cinch on the bottom to prevent fish from escaping.

Omega isn’t the only seafood company that fishes in the bay. Most of the harvest is from the Atlantic Ocean, but it is processed in Reedville.

But in recent years, menhaden have become a major symbol of the bay. The little forage fish is a crucial part of the local ecosystem, a nutrient-dense food source for species from ospreys and eagles to the striped bass and red drum that support the local recreational fishing industry – and businesses like Dollar’s.

Dollar has spent his life on the Chesapeake Bay. He owns a charter fishing business, equipping sport fishers and taking them out on the water to catch local favorites like striped bass and rockfish.

Each year hundreds of millions of fish are harvest to make fish oil and fish meal which are used in pet food and supplements. Virginia is the last East Coast state that allows menhaden reduction fishing in state waters.

One of them is the dollar. He said he sees drastically fewer fish in the bay and its tributaries than he used to. Schools of menhaden that used to be “the size of a football field” have shrunk to “maybe a tennis court,” he said. “You see those smaller and smaller numbers.”

“You’ve got to wonder if this industrial fishery, which is a large one, has a place in the 21st century, in a narrow bay that’s already facing so many other problems,” Dollar said.

Omega Protein, the last company in the region to harvest menhaden, says there is no evidence that the population is in a poor state. Critics think that data doesn’t address what’s happening in the bay.

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“What we need to contemplate as a society is the balance,” said Bryan Watts, director of William & Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology. “How much do we care about the functioning of the ecosystem and the long term health of the ecosystem, and how much do we care about industry?”

From the platform overlooking the water he pointed to bins holding the previous day’s catch, packed full of fish shimmering in the morning sun.

These bins allow the fish to move from one place to another in a process known as “cooked, squeezed and pressed.” In other words, they are used to make fish meal and fish oil for things like feed farm-raised salmon and shrimp.