Fisheries regulators voted Wednesday to slash the Chesapeake Bay's menhaden catch cap to the lowest level on record, cutting the Bay limit by about one-third over the next two years while also trimming the coastwide catch allowed from Maine to Florida. The move drew a mixed reaction from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which called the Bay-specific cuts a win but said the broader coastwide limits still don't do enough to protect the small, oily fish that anchors the region's food web.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission's Atlantic Menhaden Management Board set the new limits on Wednesday, November 11, lowering the coastwide total allowable catch to 170,000 metric tons in 2027 and 155,000 metric tons in 2028, according to a press release from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. That amounts to roughly a nine percent cut in each of the two years, part of a reduction the commission says represents a 17 percent drop from the 2026 catch limit and a 34 percent drop from 2025's limit over the two-year span.
Within that broader coastwide reduction, the Board also tied the Chesapeake Bay's own catch cap to 21.8 percent of the coastwide total, with a hard ceiling of 51,000 metric tons regardless of how that percentage math works out. Under the new numbers, the Bay cap will fall to 37,123 metric tons in 2027 and 33,847 metric tons in 2028 — down from the current 51,000-metric-ton limit, per the commission. The 2027 coastwide limit takes effect January 1, 2027, while the new Bay cap doesn't kick in until May 1, 2027, and the commission says it will revisit the Bay cap at least every three years going forward.
Bay Advocates Call It Progress, Not a Finish Line
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation said the Atlantic menhaden catch limits set this week do not go far enough and that additional measures are still needed to protect the fish and the wildlife that depend on them, as CBS News Baltimore reported. Will Poston, the Foundation's forage fish campaign manager, called the Bay-specific action a hard-earned win but not the finish line, and said reaching the lowest Chesapeake Bay cap on record marks real progress toward a healthy Bay.
Still, Poston argued the menhaden board failed to follow its own ecosystem science when it mattered most, and he criticized other states and federal agencies for yielding on ecosystem-based menhaden management, according to the same report. He thanked representatives from Maryland, New York, Connecticut, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Rhode Island for backing science-based management, while saying more must be done to protect menhaden and the wildlife that depend on them. Menhaden serve as a key food source for osprey, striped bass, bluefish, other fish species and some mammals, per CBS News Baltimore's reporting.
For its part, the Atlantic Menhaden Management Board said its catch caps balance ecosystem needs against the interests of Atlantic coast fisheries, and that the decision followed deliberation over real scientific uncertainties. That uncertainty showed up directly in the commission's own modeling: the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission projected a zero percent chance of overfishing in 2027 and 2028 under the new limits, but still a high probability that fishing mortality would remain above the board's own ecological reference point target.
A Debate Fed by Thousands of Public Comments
The scale of public interest in the decision was substantial: the commission says it received more than 48,000 written comments from stakeholders on both sides of the issue ahead of the vote. Some of those comments pushed for far steeper cuts than regulators ultimately adopted — the Forage Fish Campaign called for a coastwide limit of just 74,000 metric tons, while other commenters sought a cut to 114,200 metric tons, according to WBOC.
Going into the vote, Maryland Matters had reported a separate proposal on the table that would have lowered the Chesapeake Bay's menhaden catch limit by up to 50 percent, a sign of how contentious the debate had become in the days before the board's final action, per Maryland Matters. Commission staff have also acknowledged a scientific gap at the center of the fight: available data could not establish how much fishing pressure, as opposed to migration patterns or environmental conditions, has affected local menhaden availability, the same WBOC report noted.
That uncertainty is layered on top of some conflicting signals about menhaden abundance. The commission's 2025 stock assessment update estimated average biomass across the full time series as 37 percent lower than the prior 2022 update, even as that same update indicated total biomass had slightly increased since 2021. Closer to home, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources survey found a sharp drop in adult menhaden abundance in the Choptank River in 2024, with the index remaining low in 2025, per WBOC's reporting.
How the New Cap Compares to Decades of Rule Changes
Wednesday's vote is the latest chapter in a two-decade history of tightening Bay-specific harvest rules. Regulators first capped the Chesapeake Bay menhaden harvest at 123,000 metric tons back in 2006, and then cut that limit further in 2018 under Amendment 3, bringing it down to the 51,000-metric-ton level that stood until this week's decision, according to the commission's own addendum documents.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has also pointed out that the reduction fishery operating in the Bay didn't come close to hitting even the old, higher cap recently — the fishery caught fewer than 35,000 metric tons of menhaden in 2025, well below the then-current 51,000-metric-ton limit, per the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Looking ahead, researchers expect to publish preliminary findings on the fishing industry's broader impacts as soon as late 2027, according to reporting from The Baltimore Banner.
Poston said the Foundation plans to keep pushing for stronger protections that leave more menhaden in the water for both wildlife and coastal communities, and he called for the upcoming research to be rigorous, transparent, and free from undue industry influence. With the Bay cap not taking effect until May 2027 and a mandated review at least every three years after that, the debate over how much menhaden the Bay's ecosystem actually needs left in the water is clearly far from settled.
