A UM team including Jiangang Luo reanalyzed results of a historic tagging study conduced from 1966 through 1971 and used to guide management of the Atlantic menhaden fishery. They found discrepancies in numbers of released and recovered tagged fish, reconstruction of historical fishing effort, and treatment of tag-detection efficiency at processing plants.

The team’s reconstructed datasets produced natural mortality estimates near 0.50 per year, lower than both the 1.17 estimate reported in a 2019 reanalysis incorporated into the benchmark stock assessment by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission and the corrected value of 0.92 adopted in a 2025 update. An artificially high rate can underestimate fishing’s impact and overestimate the size of the breeding population, leading to overly optimistic harvest targets.

• Jiangang Luo