According to Grok

The price of bait is too high! Scarcity of a product drives price. There is an overall scarcity of bait-menhaden, herring and mackerel. The 20% cut in TAC approved at last year’s ATMFC Menhaden Board meeting does not help anyone. It will drive up the price of bait even more and is not enough to stop the decline in the menhaden population.  There is a solution, which was suggested in the public comments, (link, p.9) by Paul Eidman, charter captain and founder of menhaden defenders. Briefly, it is as follows: Set a TAC of 75,616 metric tons, allocated 100% to the bait fishery, 0% to the reduction fishery, and ban harvesting of menhaden for reduction purposes. But we don’t have to worry about this issue right now. Right now, I would like to talk about menhaden and the science.

I listened to the October 2025 menhaden board meeting and I downloaded the comments from the public and the meeting transcript. In addition to Paul Eidman’s comment that I mentioned above, there were several from ME fishermen who spoke about the abundance of menhaden in ME.  I sent out an email to several of them and got a nice letter (link) from Kimberly Matthews who told about her spotter pilot could go out 30 miles and still see schools of menhaden. I shared this with Fred Akers of NJ, and he did an AI investigation in which he asked if the menhaden expansion was a result of the 2021 implementation of catch limits. The answer was positive. So gave it a try. I used Grok 4 because that is supposed to be the most technical and science related system. Below is a summary of the responses to 8 questions that I asked, with links to the questions, answers and references.

Menhaden Summary:

Menhaden harvest and reduction of the fish for oil began in the mid-1800’s to replace whale oil and continued unregulated until 2012. The population initially ranged from Nova Scotia to Florida, but with heavy fishing, shrank from their original range to just the mid-Atlantic states. After the new limit was instituted in 2012, the population expanded to the NY Bight (Cape May, NJ to Montauk Pt.) the Gulf of Maine and into Canada, essentially re-occupying their historical range. This expansion is attributed to the 25% cut in harvest implemented by the new total annual catch that went into effect in 2013. (link)

Elimination of the harvest of menhaden for reduction purposes, while still allowing for harvest for bait purposes would leave over 110,000 metric tons of menhaden in the water. More forage directly supports higher productivity and abundance of striped bass (the Atlantic’s most valuable recreational/commercial species).  This would be a net positive for the health and productivity of the Atlantic fishery as a whole, while accelerating the northward recovery trend. .(link)

A diet of high-lipid forage fish (herring, mackerel, menhaden) substantially increases female fish fecundity—both absolute (total eggs) and relative (eggs per gram body weight)—compared to diets dominated by invertebrates and crustaceans. A diet of high lipid forage fish would also produce larger egg size with better yolk reserves and improved egg quality, fertilization, and hatching success. (link)

Depletion of forage fish stocks risks reduced reproductive output in predators, underscoring their foundational role. (link)

The evidence strongly supports a nutritional link: a low-lipid invertebrate-heavy forage base contributes to the observed poor cod metrics, and bolstering high-lipid pelagic forage (herring, mackerel, menhaden) would likely improve outcomes as part of broader recovery efforts. (link)

Atlantic cod (and other gadids like haddock, pollock, and white hake) in the Gulf of Maine historically aggregated at the mouths of rivers to feed on alewives—both adult alewives migrating in during spring and, especially, juvenile (young-of-the-year or YOY) alewives emigrating in the fall. This prey abundance helped the cod fatten up and maintain condition, which would support energy reserves needed before their winter/early spring spawning period. (link)

Reducing harvest of menhaden, herring, and mackerel is a sound ecosystem-based management step that should meaningfully improve cod condition and buffer some impacts of ongoing warming. It won’t “solve” climate-driven challenges on its own but would meaningfully enhance the population’s capacity to tolerate incremental temperature increases. (link)

In the context of US Atlantic cod, reducing harvest of lipid-rich forage fish like menhaden, herring, and mackerel would promote the kind of population health that maximizes both immediate resilience and long-term adaptive potential to modest ongoing warming in the Northeast US shelf. This ecosystem-based approach strengthens overall fisheries management under climate change. (link)

If the ME fishermen are correct, and there are an abundance of menhaden, then we should start to see results in the cod populations. And they also have restored the alewives in the rivers in ME, so cod might be seen when the alewives go up to spawn in the spring or when the young alewives come down in the fall. Maine could be the birthplace of the restoration of the Atlantic fishery.