The Chesapeake Bay is dying. Nutrient pollution and over-exploitation combine to create a massive dead zone that stretches from north of Annapolis, down south past the mouth of the Potomac River. Until 1975, the Chesapeake produced more seafood per acre than any body of water on the planet. Today, for much of the year, as much as one third of the bay cannot support anything except anaerobic bacteria.

One contributing factor to the death of the Chesapeake is the absence of a species of small fish called menhaden. Menhaden clean the water by eating the phytoplankton whose overgrowth lead to the formation of the dead zone. Menhaden could go a long way towards cleaning the water and restoring the ecosystem, if they were not being artificially kept out of the Chesapeake. There are large numbers of menhaden out in the Atlantic, but any that try to enter the Chesapeake are caught and killed before they are able to reach the phytoplankton-choked parts of the bay.

Industrial fishing for menhaden is outlawed by every east coast state except Virginia and North Carolina. Unfortunately for the Chesapeake Bay, although most of the bay is protected under Maryland jurisdiction, the mouth of the bay, where it connects to the Atlantic, is within the borders of Virginia. Virginia law allows industrial fishing of menhaden to the point that they are all but excluded from the bay.

Unfortunately for the menhaden, they have evolved to form massive, exceptionally tight schools at the surface of the water. Tight schools protect them from their natural predators, and the surface is where their food is most abundant. For humans, this means that the fish are readily visible from spotter planes, and entire schools (which can be big enough to be extend for many acres) are easily ensnared with a single giant purse seine net. Any schools of menhaden that swim from the Atlantic into the mouth of the Chesapeake are easily spotted, caught, and reduced to fertilizer and fish meal-- all legally under Virginia law.

Why not increase the numbers of menhaden in the Chesapeake by herding them into the bay, while avoiding Virginia jurisdiction? The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal connects the northern ends of those two bays. Why not chase a few schools of menhaden from the Delaware Bay, through the canal, and into the Chesapeake Bay? The behaviors that make menhaden so easy to net should also make them easy to herd. Once in the northern end of the Chesapeake, even if they swam straight to the mouth of the bay to get caught in Virginia waters, the menhaden would still have to swim through, and clean up, more than a hundred miles of phytoplankton-saturated Chesapeake water.

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