By Remick Smothers
As fisheries managers prepare to meet November 9–12 in Newport, Rhode Island, the Chesapeake Bay is running out of excuses for inaction.
I live in Virginia's Tidewater region, along the lower Chesapeake Bay. When my family moved here in 2021, one of the first things that struck me was how alive the river felt. Nearly every nesting platform seemed to have a pair of ospreys. And every fall, you could stand along the James at sunset and watch schools of menhaden announce themselves across the surface. Sometimes there were dozens of them; sometimes it seemed like hundreds. The river would dimple like it was raining.
Predators followed. Fish crashed through the schools and birds worked overhead. You didn't need a fisheries degree or a spreadsheet to understand what you were looking at: food.
Five years later, I find myself looking for those schools. Some evenings, we're lucky to see a bait ball. That observation is anecdotal, and I understand that. One fisherman watching one stretch of one river does not constitute a stock assessment.
But here's the problem: the scientists are seeing it too. And with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) preparing to meet November 9–12 in Newport, the question is no longer whether we have enough evidence to be concerned. It's whether the people responsible for managing this fishery are willing to act on it.
In 2023, William & Mary's Center for Conservation Biology monitored 167 osprey nests in the lower Chesapeake Bay. Only 17 produced any young. Those nests produced just 21 chicks, and researchers reported reproductive performance below what they had documented during the DDT era. They also found that male ospreys in Mobjack Bay were catching menhaden at a rate more than 80% lower than in 1985. Researchers identified starvation as the primary cause of nest failure.
Critics argued that Mobjack Bay was too small a sample, so the scientists expanded the study. In 2024, researchers monitored 571 osprey pairs across 12 areas of the Chesapeake Bay. Ten were higher-salinity areas where ospreys depend heavily on menhaden; two were low-salinity reference areas where the birds rely more heavily on catfish and gizzard shad. Only about one-third of pairs in high-salinity waters successfully raised broods, compared with roughly two-thirds in low-salinity waters. Researchers concluded that low menhaden availability was a major driver of poor reproduction in those high-salinity areas.
Even more compelling, researchers previously conducted an experiment in which they supplemented osprey nests with menhaden, and reproductive performance improved.
That matters. We're no longer talking about fishermen sitting at a marina saying, "There doesn't seem to be as much bait around anymore." We're talking about measurable food stress in one of the Chesapeake Bay's most recognizable predators, a species that tells us something important about the health of the food web. Ospreys don't care about stock assessments, harvest quotas, or whether a fishery has been declared sustainable. They need fish, and when the fish aren't available, their chicks don't survive. That should concern anyone who cares about the Chesapeake Bay.
This is where the menhaden debate often gets deliberately confusing. Atlantic menhaden are currently classified as not overfished, and conventional overfishing is not occurring. You'll hear those words repeatedly from defenders of the reduction fishery. But fisheries management has finally begun acknowledging something fishermen and ecologists have understood forever: a forage fish cannot be managed solely by asking how many forage fish we can sustainably kill. You also have to ask how many need to remain alive to feed everything else. That's why ASMFC adopted ecological reference points for menhaden in 2020.
And the newest assessment contains an important warning. In 2025, ASMFC found that menhaden fishing mortality was above its ecological target and fecundity was below its ecological target. The Commission cut the 2026 coastwide quota by 20%. But its own projections found that even this reduction leaves a 100% probability that fishing mortality will remain above the ecological target. According to ASMFC, reducing that probability would require a quota reduction of 50% or more.
Call it what you want. The ecological warning is right there in the Commission's own assessment. The menhaden population may be capable of sustaining the harvest, but the ecosystem may not be, and that distinction is the entire debate.
The Chesapeake Bay remains the only place on the Atlantic coast where an industrial reduction fishery operates inside a major estuary. The current Bay cap allows up to 51,000 metric tons of reduction harvest annually, and that number was not derived from a scientific calculation of how many menhaden the Chesapeake ecosystem needs. ASMFC explains that the original Bay cap was established as a precaution against localized depletion and that today's 51,000-metric-ton cap approximates historical average reduction landings from 2012 through 2016.
Think about that. We have scientists documenting starving ospreys. We have evidence that supplementing their nests with menhaden improves reproductive success. We have an ecosystem model showing that menhaden harvest affects the predators that depend on them, and that same model is telling managers we're exceeding the ecological fishing target. Yet our Chesapeake Bay harvest limit is still fundamentally rooted in how much we historically caught, rather than a scientifically determined amount of forage the Bay needs.
ASMFC has already begun considering additional precautionary management measures for the Chesapeake Bay reduction fishery. That's an acknowledgment that the current approach deserves scrutiny. But acknowledging a problem and addressing it are two very different things.
At some point, the burden of proof has to change. There will always be another explanation: climate change, water quality, habitat, salinity, shifting migration patterns, something happening offshore. Some of those explanations undoubtedly matter, and ecosystems are complicated. But of all the pressures on the Bay, industrial harvest is the only variable we can control. Managers can't set a quota on warming water or legislate the Bay's salinity. They can decide how many menhaden are pulled out of it. And precisely because the Bay faces all of those other threats, ASMFC should be managing for abundance and resilience, leaving enough forage in the water to give the ecosystem a buffer against the pressures no one can regulate.
Complexity cannot become an excuse for paralysis. I don't need every dead osprey chick or missing bait ball to be traced directly back to a purse seine before I'm willing to act, and I don't believe the people charged with protecting this ecosystem should need that either.
When commissioners arrive at the Hotel Viking in Newport on November 9, they will be representing states whose fishermen, coastal communities, and marine ecosystems all depend on healthy forage populations. They should arrive prepared to confront the implications of their own science, not simply repeat that menhaden are not overfished under conventional reference points. Those are different questions, and the Chesapeake deserves answers to both.
We have spent decades asking how many menhaden the industry can sustainably remove. It's time to ask how many the Chesapeake needs us to leave behind. Menhaden aren't simply another commodity swimming through Virginia waters. They are food for striped bass, cobia, red drum, ospreys, whales and dolphins, moving energy from plankton through an extraordinary marine ecosystem. When you industrially harvest forage fish, you aren't simply harvesting one species. You're harvesting from everything that was supposed to eat them.
I have watched this river change in five years. Now the science is documenting changes that are far bigger than my backyard. The ospreys are telling us. The ecosystem models are telling us. And next week, the people responsible for managing this fishery will be sitting together in one room.
The science is clear enough to act. The question is whether ASMFC will listen.