Welcome to The Bait Line: The Fight to Save America's Fisheries Starts Here.

September 18, 2026

By Whit Fosburgh

Welcome to The Bait Line. Our goal is to create a place where the key issues around forage fish conservation, from science to administrative and legal processes, can be discussed in terms people can actually understand. You will hear directly from experts and people on the water and in coastal communities.

First, about me, the Forage Fish Campaign, and why it exists. I came to conservation through fishing and growing up in the woods of Upstate New York, and spent about 40 years working on fish and wildlife policy in Washington, DC. This included five years working as a staff member in the U.S. Senate, running the fisheries program at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, 15 years at Trout Unlimited, and then 14 years as the President and CEO at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. 

Of all the issues I worked on, fisheries management, and especially forage fish management, proved the most vexing and the one most in need of reform.

As most who read this blog already know, forage fish are the foundation of ocean food webs, transferring energy from plankton to larger predators that support valuable recreational and commercial fisheries. Despite their ecological and economic importance, however, industrial-scale reduction fishing and midwater trawling has driven many of these fish populations to historic lows, with devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and coastal economies.

A few facts worth mentioning:

Worldwide, about 30% of all the fish caught commercially are forage fish, with almost all of these ground up into fish meal and oil to feed aquaculture fish and pets. In the U.S., the second largest commercial fishery (behind only Alaskan pollack) is the menhaden (aka “bunker” or “pogie”) fishery, which reduces more than 4 billion fish into feed and oil every year, mostly for export.

The history of forage fish management in the U.S. is a history of failure. 

After the U.S. kicked foreign factory trawlers out of its waters in the 1970s, we subsidized the development of our own midwater trawl fleet along the Atlantic. These giant boats, often with two boats pulling a net the size of a football field between them, proved equally adept at collapsing the Atlantic herring and mackerel populations, which it most recently did in 2018/19. But the industry received an $11 million taxpayer bailout for the disaster it created. It is likely that herring and mackerel will not recover for another decade.

In 1900, the menhaden fishery boasted more than 100 reduction plants from Maine through Florida. One by one, every state along the Atlantic, except Virginia, banned this type of fishing because it was so destructive. These bans were often led by other commercial fishermen. But Virginia, with one plant owned by Canada’s Cooke Industries employing about 250 people, ramped up. Today it uses its fleet of mother ships, spotter planes and chase boats to find and catch entire schools of menhaden from Cape Cod to South Carolina. 

In the Gulf, where only Louisiana and Mississippi allow reduction fishing, Cooke and South African based Oceana Group grind up more than 3 billion fish every year for animal feed. In fact, a staggering 75% of all the commercial fish landings in the Gulf are menhaden for the reduction industry.

The ecological and economic consequences of these fisheries are now becoming clear. 

In the Gulf, where there is no catch limit, science from the University of Florida shows that the menhaden fishery suppresses key gamefish populations by as much as 15%, including king and Spanish mackerel and redfish. In addition, according to a study by the state of Louisiana, more than 150 million non-target fish are killed as bycatch in the menhaden fishery every year, including tens of thousands of bull redfish and other valuable recreational and commercial species. Meanwhile recreational anglers are seeing reduced bag limits and seasons to protect these critical species.

And the politicians’ response to declining menhaden catches in the Gulf? Rollback nearshore buffers zones that protect sensitive habitats and reduce bycatch.

It’s even worse in the Atlantic. Despite a requirement that managers manage menhaden for ecosystem benefit, Atlantic menhaden are likely collapsing after years of overharvest, impacting coastal economies from North Carolina to Maine and species from striped bass to osprey.

And how did this happen? In order to protect the reduction industry in the face of new ecosystem management requirements, scientists at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), which manages menhaden, said they discovered new science in 2020 showing that there were far more menhaden in the water than anyone ever knew, so the quota was jacked up to more than 233,000 metric tons. At the time, conservationists warned, to no avail, that the new science was garbage and that the new quota would result in significant overharvest.

In the fall of 2025, those same scientists admitted that indeed the science was wrong and that the quota was far too high. That has been recently confirmed by two prominent University of Miami scientists. In fact, their published study shows that the situation is even more dire.

But instead of responding to the warning call from its own scientists, who said that the quota would need to be cut from 233,000 mt to 108,000 mt to give striped bass even just a 50/50 chance at recovering, the managers at the ASMFC succumbed to reduction industry pressure and instead adopted a 186,000 mt quota. The same amount that industry had been able to catch the previous year after years of excessive harvest. In other words, it was a paper cut and not a real cut, protecting the Canadian company and its one plant in Virginia while letting American recreational anglers, the bait sector, and the marine ecosystem take all the pain of mismanagement.

At the beginning of 2026, we created the Forage Fish Campaign with one simple goal: to end industrial fishing for the forage base.

For decades, fishermen and conservationists have worked within the system created by Congress to manage our fisheries. There have been some successes, but on the whole, the results have been abysmal. Almost two-thirds of all species managed along the Atlantic and in the Gulf are designated as overfished, experiencing overfishing, depleted or status unknown. Would anyone in the private sector still have a job with this track record?

The system is rigged against sustainability, small boat commercial fishermen and recreational anglers. That’s because industrial fishing interests have infiltrated every aspect of decision-making, including the scientific processes, appointments to fishery management bodies, and even the federal agencies themselves. 

Instead of working to create long-term value in our fisheries by managing for abundance, these special interests are happy to over-exploit a public natural resource, receive federal bailout money when fisheries fail, and then move on to a new fishery, where the cycle begins again.

I admit that fisheries management is hard, and that is especially true for the forage base at a time when we know our oceans are changing. So why don’t we try to manage higher on the food chain knowing that these fish have enough to eat? 

Almost all the states figured this out long ago by banning reduction fishing and midwater trawl fishing in their waters. But a handful of bad actors still exploit the federal water off our coasts and a few key estuaries like Chesapeake Bay. In addition, we need to end the charade of foreign companies skirting the law to exploit our waters after having wiped out their own fisheries.

A more fundamental question is whether it makes sense to treat the foundation of the ocean food web as a commodity to be exploited to feed other animals.

This is why the Forage Fish Campaign was created. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization under the federal tax code. We do not want to be a forever organization; we want to win and close our doors and go fishing. We want to empower a broad coalition of nonprofits and businesses to demand an end to industrial fishing on the forage base and to ensure that managers do not slide backwards in the future. 

We are not anti-commercial fishing. In fact, we should further invest in our bait sector to help fishermen, from Maine lobstermen and Chesapeake Bay crabbers to those who supply the recreational fishing sector. They did not cause the problem but are struggling with its consequences. And every small boat commercial fisherman, from tuna fishermen in Maine to striped bass fishermen in New Jersey, will benefit from more bait in the water.

Advocates have an opportunity this fall to influence management when, in November, the ASMFC again takes up menhaden management and sets new quotas for the Atlantic Coast and the Chesapeake Bay. They have the new science and they have countless reports from the Chesapeake Bay through New England that the menhaden population is collapsing and taking striped bass, osprey and local economies down with it. You will hear more about that in the weeks ahead.

Thank you for your interest in conservation and healthy oceans. If you want to get more engaged, sign our petition, add your business or organization to the coalition, or reach out to us directly.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Truth Social @foragefishcampaign, and on X @foragefishcmpgn. 

Reach out directly at info@foragefishcampaign.org. We would love to hear from you.