December 23, 2022 — An innovative new technique to assess the health of fish population that set lower triggers for catch quotas has found that menhaden — probably the most controversial catch in Virginia — are doing even better than expected.
As a result, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission increased its coastwide quota for menhaden by 20%, while leaving its cap on the Chesapeake Bay catch at 51,000 metric tons.
Sports fishermen have pressed for years for more limits on the menhaden catch, arguing that Reedville-based Omega Proteins fleet is taking too many fish, and leaving the population is too low to help the popular, if overfished, striped bass that feed on menhaden.
But the new ecological reference point technique for assessing the stock, which looks at how many fish are born and how many die, whether through fishing or being eaten by predators or dying from natural causes, specifically looks at how menhaden population is affecting striped bass and other species.
Menhaden mortality is below the “target” level determined with the new reference point technique – that is, whether through fishing or what would be needed to support healthy populations of the fish that eat menhaden, deaths are less than what is needed to maintain a sustainable population, and far below the “threshold which is when the there’s a danger of population collapse, the Atlantic States commission found.