"In August 2024, ASMFC established a working group to recommend a menhaden action plan that will balance the needs of fisheries and wildlife. The issue grew more contentious when a formal response pushing back against Watts’s work by Latour and two other VIMS scientists was published in Frontiers in Marine Science in October 2024. They point out that although Osprey reproductive difficulties are concerning, any number of factors could be contributing to nest failures, including predation, disease, climate change, and, yes, menhaden.

'There’s so much we just don’t know still,' Latour says. 'Until we can study Osprey and menhaden together, we will just be guessing.'

Even Watts’s collaborator Rattner at the USGS, who has documented the starving chicks and empty nests, says he still cannot conclusively tie it to the Osprey’s inability to find menhaden.

'There is good evidence there’s something going on,' Rattner says. 'I think some of it is related to food availability, but I haven’t been able to rule out other factors.'..."