Long Island fishermen feeling impact of decline in bunker fish harvest

Will Caldwell, a commercial fisherman from Hampton Bays, spent the past decade riding the ups and downs of the menhaden fishery before hitting another wall this spring for what he said is the last time.

"There’s none around," he said of the small silver baitfish with a prominent black dot, known as bunker. "There’s zero."

As a result, he said, he plans to give up a packing plant he's kept in Aquebogue, near where he’s fished along the Peconic River, and sell off equipment, which includes boats, hoists and a fork lift.

"It’s almost three years now" since he’s seen bunker schools in numbers where he could harvest his catch limit of 20,000 pounds a day, he said. He and two other fishermen, including Tom Gariepy, a commercial fisherman from Blue Point, would fill small boats to the gunwales with bunker, and use a power hoist to load them into large crates for shipment to Bay Shore, Maine and Virginia, where they were resold for bait to catch striped bass, lobsters and even crawfish.

State landing figures tell the same tale across the region.

From a high of 4 million pounds harvested in 2020, New York commercial fishermen landed 727,372 pounds last year, and word from fishermen this summer suggests 2026 will bring much of the same. Some blame the decline on overfishing; others say it is cyclical. Whatever the reason, the decline not only impacts commercial fishermen, but also other species that depend on the fish as a food source, such as whales, sharks, striped bass, bluefish and osprey.

Had the bunker been abundant, fishermen such as Caldwell could have worked toward a state quota of 3.2 million pounds last year, but only 22% of the quota was harvested. Four of the past five years have seen marked declines in the state harvest.

Conservation groups and some sport fishermen say the problem is the fact that one state — Virginia — gets 75% of the quota for menhaden, and that one fishing company, Ocean Harvesters, is landing all those fish for one company, Omega Protein, a subsidiary of Canada-based seafood giant Cooke Inc.

Those companies, in response, noted that official assessments say bunker are not overfished.

"The evidence shows that a sustainable commercial fishery can coexist with a healthy menhaden stock, adequate forage for predators and successful recreational fisheries," spokesman Robert Vanasse wrote in response to Newsday questions.

Veterans of Long Island waters aren’t so sure.

Mike Jacobs, a longtime recreational fisherman who also has a state commercial food-fish license, said he believes the drop in bunker populations has been pronounced in recent years, after decades of abundance. He and other sports fishermen express little doubt about where the fish have gone.

"I would go out the [Jones] inlet and see pods of adult bunker by the millions," he said. "You don’t see that today like you did. They are being slaughtered. They’re on the surface so they’re easy to spot" by spotter planes used by the protein boats. "They’re wiping them out. It’s out of balance."

Jaclyn Lunaas, forage-fish manager for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a group seeking to protect the bunker, is strongly endorsing efforts not just to limit the total harvest of bunker to more sustainable levels, but also to make sure that harvest is distributed more evenly among the coastal states, rather than concentrated on industrial boats out of Virginia.

Between 2023 and 2025, the Atlantic coastwide quota was 233,550 metric tons, and the bulk of Virginia’s quota was taken by Omega Protein through Ocean Harvesters. Lunaas' group would like the annual quota to be closer to 108,000 metric tons per year. New York gets 0.84% of the quota.

"We are hoping there will be further cuts to the coastwide quota over the next two years," Lunaas said.

But one veteran fisheries commissioner said changing those interstate quotas won’t be easy.

"It’s almost impossible to change quota shares because no one [state] wants to give up their quota," said Pat Augustine, a former commissioner on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which manages Atlantic menhaden. Augustine spent 16 years on the commission as New York’s representative and knows how it works. Virginia will most certainly take issue with any reduction of its 75% share, he said: "Virginia will scream bloody murder."

Yet Augustine said a more evenly divided quota, and a lower one, is certainly in order, particularly if the commission’s technical committee determines it’s needed. That could happen given an acknowledged miscalculation by the commission in the menhaden stock assessment that resulted in too many fish being harvested last year.

"It was a major mistake," Augustine said. "I’m very concerned about it because the information is so bad."

Augustine recalled a meeting he attended that former State Sen. Owen Johnson requested with Omega Protein after its boats were seen lingering in Long Island Sound. It was 20 years ago and Johnson wanted answers about the company’s harvesting operations.

"He asked Omega’s rep, ‘Mr. Brown, will you tell me how many bunker do you catch when you drop that net out?' " Augustine recalled. "And Brown said, ‘Well senator, we catch all of them.’ "

Vanasse, the spokesman for Omega Protein and Ocean Harvesters, in a statement to Newsday, argued the menhaden fishery "should continue to be managed on the basis of the stock assessment, ecological reference points and new science as it becomes available," while decrying the "advocacy" of special interest groups that seek fishing reductions he said are not based on science.

As for perceived reductions in New York, Vanasse noted menhaden can occur in "enormous concentrations in one area and then be scarce or absent there during another period. Their distribution changes with season, temperature, oceanographic conditions, recruitment, food availability and other factors."

Mike Ferrigno, who owns L & L Wholesale Bait in Bay Shore, said while he’s certainly seen the lack of bunker impact the abundance of the fish compared with past years, he’s less inclined to blame it on big commercial harvesters.

"We found the majority of bunker are swimming past here in early to mid-March, and by the middle of May, any adult bunker are well north of Newport [Rhode Island]," he said. Right now, he added, there’s a large body of bunker between Maine and Nova Scotia.

"I don’t think we’re wiped out like everyone’s crying we are," he said. "I think we got spoiled for five or six years with the big schools," and now there’s a down cycle. Ferrigno recounted the wisdom of a former partner, who told him to never count on a harvest because "everything changes in fishing. He was right. Things have crashed here," and returned.

"We packed a lot of bunker in March, and thank God we did because that’s what I’m selling now," he said. Same with last fall, when he didn’t expect it, though the fish were "much smaller."

Aphrodite Montalvo, a spokeswoman for the state DEC, said in an email that while anecdotal public sightings and commercial landings of menhaden have "decreased in the past few years, public sightings and landings in northern states, such as Maine, have increased considerably."

"The stock assessment update still shows that, on a coastwide basis, Atlantic menhaden are not overfished and overfishing is not occurring, which is detailed on the stock assessment update FAQ website," she wrote.

But don’t tell that to observers such as Jacobs.

"It’s absolutely getting worse, both in the oceans and the bays," he said. "Someone has to wake up to what’s going on, and who is profiting from this. It’s all about money."

At least one Long Islander who made a good living off bunker in the past clearly is no longer.

Some years, bunker fisherman Caldwell’s haul was valued between $500,000 and $1 million, including years he worked to remove bunker from shorelines after massive die-offs around the Peconic Bay.

"That’s all gone now," he said.

These days, Caldwell said, his operation is in the red, including for $30,000 in rent on his Aquebogue plant, an amount his wife recently suggested may be better spent in the stock market. The boats, hoists and other equipment are worth around $300,000, he said.

"I just told my landlord, I’m shutting down, selling everything," he said. "It’s costing me."

Gariepy, who fishes now primarily out of Long Island Sound on a boat formerly owned by Phil Karlin, who retired this year, said he caught some bunker in April and May, but not a lot.

"I’m not depending on them" for a living, he said.

But he’s also convinced that the fish will be back. He’s seen records showing slow periods of bunker lasting from five to eight years, "followed by years of booms."