Weakfish once crowded New Jersey waters. No one can agree on why that stopped.

CUMBERLAND COUNTY, N.J. — Taxidermy and weathered photos line the walls at Higbee’s Bait and Tackle in Fortescue, artifacts from bygone days when the sleepy Delaware Bay town was truly the “weakfish capital of the world.”

The taxidermy is a dusty, 12-pound “tide runner,” the nickname fishermen bestow on the biggest, trophy weakfish, a member of the drum family with a tan, often iridescent body and a reputation for fighting hard on a fishing line. The black-and-white photo shows a single fisherman standing beside his catch, about 30 weakfish of various sizes.

Tide runners are unicorns today, a rarity on both New Jersey coasts and across the bay, in Delaware. Catch limits enacted by state fisheries would prevent a single fisherman from catching dozens of fish today, though most would be happy with one legal keeper they could fry up in lemon and butter.

Fishermen have plenty of theories about where all the weakfish have gone. They blame dolphins and dogfish for gobbling up the young; nuclear power plants; the rise of other popular game fish, like striped bass; and offshore seafood trawlers.

Some are introspective.

“I’ll be real honest. It’s us. Back in the day, in the ’80s, we fished these things so hard,” said Mike Rothman, captain of the Bonanza II, a 65-foot charter boat out of Fortescue. “We did it to ourselves, and I’m the first one that — 100% — we did this to ourselves.”

Jessica Gorzo, a scientist with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, who’s studied weakfish, said the population has been on the decline since the mid-2000s. She said the population decline over those two decades is the result of natural mortality from predators, not fishing.

“The prevailing thought is the majority of predation is likely dolphins, offshore, in the winter. It’s estimated that 55% of the mortality can be attributed to dolphins,” Gorzo said. “Coming in second, a far second at 21%, is attributed to striped bass, but the dolphins are taking the lion’s share.”

Like all things under the sea, however, there’s a degree of mystery involved in spawning stock estimates. Gorzo said weakfish spawning stock estimates, in 2017, were 1,922 metric tons, which was a low number.

“To have a healthy weakfish population, the spawning stock threshold would be 6,170 metric tons,” she said.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act protects dolphins, and most fishermen and beachgoers agree their populations have grown along the Jersey coast in the summer for decades.

“More than ever,” said Joseph LoBianco, owner of Cape May Bait & Tackle. “When I go out on the Delaware Bay, I see them year-round. They are here all the time, and they’re eating a lot of the smaller fish.”

In 2010, New Jersey tightened weakfish regulations, allowing fishermen to keep just one fish, 13 inches or longer, per day, but many said it was too late to stop the population free fall.

“Back in the day, you were allowed to keep 15 fish per fisherman,” Rothman said.

Gorzo said tight regulations on weakfish should result in a comeback. That’s what happened with striped bass, arguably the most popular sport fish along the Jersey Shore, a species that seems more abundant today than it was decades ago.

“Striped bass do seem to be doing really well,” she said.

Striped bass are also voracious and grow large enough to swallow bigger weakfish.

“They are the vacuum cleaners of the ocean,” Rothman said of striped bass.

In May, Gorzo appeared on the Finnsylvania podcast to discuss the decline of weakfish. The episode was titled “The Ghosts of Cape May,” another longtime weakfish destination for anglers. Host James Suleski reminisced about catching them during childhood summers there.

“They were just so abundant,” Suleski said.

Suleski, in his podcast, described the population collapse as one of the biggest mysteries in marine biology.

Around the same time the episode was released, avid fisherman Frank Ruczynski posted on Facebook, reminiscing about Fortescue’s claim to be the “weakfish capital of the world.” It received close to 700 likes and 200 comments, many of which discussed theories or dismissed the issue.

“They are probably cyclical like many species,” one man wrote.

Another said you could almost walk across the backs of weakfish in the bay at one time.

“If I would’ve known, I would’ve released all those tide runners,” another wrote.

Ruczynski, who also works for NJDEP, said 2026 was especially bad for him.

“Overall, I think it’s a mix of 100 different things going on,” he said in May, in Fortescue. “They just disappeared. It’s a shell of what we had here, back in the day.”

Ruczynski said he’s followed weakfish north, up into Cape May County and even into New York, and he wondered whether water temperatures were prompting the species to move. He said he received a message from a man in Portugal — straight east from New Jersey — who claimed that he caught a weakfish there.

Rothman, the mayor of Downe Township, which includes Fortescue, said he can take customers out and still catch weakfish, but he relies on other species, or whale and dolphin sightseeing, or even dinner cruises, for the bulk of his business.

“I’m in the entertainment business these days,” he said.

Fortescue has never been bustling as far as Shore towns go. There are no traffic lights, few businesses, and plenty of biting greenhead flies. Fishermen will always go there, but the loss of the weakfish gives it a bit of a ghost-town feel at times.

“We had a world-class fishery here, right in our backyard,” Ruczynski said.

Across the road from Rothman’s boat, at the tackle shop, owner Cliff Higbee Sr. said there were far larger weakfish in the Delaware Bay than the taxidermy on his wall.

“We had 16-, 17-pounders in here,” he said. “Used to at least.”

Higbee isn’t waiting for the tide runners to return, though. The family tackle shop is for sale for just under $400,000.