Coming Up Empty: Commercial Watermen in Maryland are Finding Fewer Menhaden

Commercial bait fishermen, who supply menhaden to other fisheries like blue crabs, are stretched thin as it gets harder to find fish.

On a morning in late July, Willie Dean is pretty happy with the haul from his pound net near the mouth of the Potomac River: roughly 170 pounds of spot, 35 pounds of croaker, 12 bushels of menhaden bait, six to eight pompano, and a few flounder.

“It’s the most spot I’ve had in three years,” he says. “All of that adds up.”

Dean has been a commercial waterman in St. Mary’s County, Maryland for more than 50 years. He catches all kinds of fish and does some crabbing and oystering, too, but his primary business is catching menhaden to sell for bait.

These small, oily fish aren’t broadly appetizing to humans, but they are an important food for many other commercially and recreationally important fish—like bluefish, cobia, and striped bass—as well as animals like whales, dolphins, and osprey. For centuries they’ve been used as bait up and down the East Coast of the United States, used to catch everything from blue crabs to lobster.

“Menhaden are my backbone,” Dean says. “That’s what built my house and put three of my kids through college.”

But good days for menhaden have been getting hard to come by in the past few years. Dean says he’s been seeing small menhaden—maybe six inches long—but then they seem to completely disappear when they get into the eight-inch range. In the last two years, it’s been hardly worth putting a net in the water. This year, he’s down to just one.

Official records kept by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources show that the state’s menhaden harvest for bait dropped from around 3.5 million pounds in 2022 to under 1 million pounds in 2024. Ten years ago, it was closer to 10 million pounds. In Virginia it’s a similar story: Harvests dropped from 5.4 million pounds in 2019 to just over 664,000 pounds in 2025, according to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

Much of the attention around menhaden has focused on the impacts of the industrial fishery that hauls in the majority of the menhaden harvest coastwide (approximately 70 percent in 2023, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission). Along the Atlantic coast, charter captains and recreational fishermen who rely on the ecological services menhaden provide fish like striped bass, bluefish, redfish, and bluefin tuna are increasingly concerned about an apparent lack of adult menhaden. Conservationists, including CBF, have also raised alarms about disruptions to the Bay’s food web if menhaden locally drop too low. For example, there have recently been steep declines in osprey chicks in parts of the Chesapeake Bay where they rely heavily on menhaden for food.

But menhaden also play a critically important role in sustaining other commercial fisheries in the Bay and the people, like Dean, who depend on them for their livelihoods.

He’s been able to hang on so far, but he can rattle off half a dozen names of watermen who got out of the business in his area because they couldn’t make the numbers work anymore.

“People are getting out of it, but they’re getting out of it because there are no fish,” he says. “If the fish came back, they’d be wide open to it again, setting two, three, four nets. But there’s no incentive to do it. It costs so much.”

A pound net itself—which extends along a series of poles in the water perpendicular to shore and directs fish into a “pound” where fishermen can net them out—costs upward of $10,000, he says. That’s before rigging it to the poles that hold it in the water (which can cost $1,000 themselves) and treating it with paint to keep it from fouling (which costs several more thousand dollars). Then of course there’s all the work to rig the net, the cost of the boats and fuel, the freezers to keep the fish after they’re caught, and the electricity to run the freezers. Dean says the electric bill for his freezers last month was $2,000.

“You have to sell a lot of fish to pay for that,” he says.

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When Dean started fishing in the 70s and 80s, the investment was worth it. At one point, he was making several trips a day to Virginia to deliver all the menhaden he was catching. He was running 11 pound nets and had three to four people working with him. A decade ago, he was down to four or five nets in a year. Four years ago he cut back to two. This year, he only set one.

“If it hadn’t been for the oysters the last two years, we would have starved. I mean literally there was nothing. It was pitiful,” he says. This year has been workable, but he’s still concerned about the long-term future of the fishery.

“Where did the fish go? That’s what I do not understand,” he says.

There have been limited studies of menhaden directly in the Chesapeake Bay, so it’s not clear exactly what is going on (amid all the warning signs, CBF has called for a pause on industrial menhaden fishing in the Bay itself until science can show it’s sustainable, while still allowing industrial fishing outside of the Bay). But what is clear is that something has changed, and it seems there are no longer enough menhaden to go around.

Dean personally feels that something is going on with pollution that could be affecting the tiny plants and animals called plankton and zooplankton that menhaden eat. He sees sewage spills and development as major sources of pollution. Both contribute well-known pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus to the water, but he also worries there might be other harmful types of pollution that routine water sampling doesn’t test. And every day he sees hundreds of pelicans and cormorants staking out his net, hungrily awaiting the fish.

He’s hopeful there can be a change, and that things will turn around again. But he’s concerned, with all the forces working against them, this time the menhaden might stay away. That would be a shame in more ways than one, he says. It’s a way to make a living, but also something more.

“It’s been good to me, and I don’t want to give it up,” he says. “I love what I do, and I’m going to keep doing it until I can’t do it anymore.”