14/08/2026
Captains were seeing more mackerel on their sonar than the federal stock assessment said existed.
Two years later, that observation is backed by real data — and it's reshaping how NOAA Fisheries Service Fisheries studies mackerel across the Northwest Atlantic.
Since 2019, Atlantic mackerel has been under a federal rebuilding plan due to declining biomass, which meant tight quotas. Despite that, captains — including Rory Mullen on the F/V Enterprise and Patrick Quinn on the F/V Retriever — kept seeing far more mackerel on sonar in winter and early spring than the official assessment accounted for. Lund's Fisheries, based in Cape May, NJ, joined a collaborative effort with NOAA Fisheries and our partner vessels to test that observation and answer a central question: was the official stock assessment undercounting the population?
So the F/V Retriever and F/V Enterprise partnered with Dr. Mei Sato of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and a team of NEFSC scientists, with Lund's helping fund Dr. Sato's research through the Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS) Science Center for Marine Fisheries.
In New Bedford, the vessels' echosounders were calibrated, then switched between two modes at sea: one to map where and how large the mackerel schools were, the other to help identify the species itself. Whenever a school lit up on screen, the crew paused fishing to jig rod-and-reel samples by hand — the F/V Retriever alone collected 91 mackerel from six locations for NEFSC scientists to measure. Using data from one January 2025 trip, researchers turned that into an actual biomass estimate: roughly 1.84 metric tons of mackerel in a single detected school, calculated from real acoustic readings and fish measurements rather than a model's projection.
The findings were presented to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council in December 2025, where a mackerel quota increase was on the table — a direct result of working mackerel boats and funded research producing the data used in federal fisheries management.
NOAA Fisheries announced a $2.3 million mackerel research initiative this May, scaling a similar acoustic approach to 50+ vessels across the fleet: acoustic surveys, biological sampling, tagging to track movement between U.S. and Canadian waters, and egg surveys to map spawning. It's the same kind of fishing-community partnership our partner vessels took part in on a smaller scale.
This builds on 11 years of Lund's funding fisheries science through SCEMFIS, an industry/university partnership with the National Science Foundation focused on reducing uncertainty in the science used to manage regional fisheries.
This is what direct-from-the-source sustainability looks like in practice: not just complying with quotas, but funding and fishing the science that sets them.
