Other Marine Fishing (U.S.) — NAICS 114119

An investor's primer on the businesses that harvest America's "everything else" from the sea: marine worms, wild seaweed, natural sponges, and sea cucumbers.

1. Overview

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is the U.S. government's standard for grouping businesses by activity. Code 114119, "Other Marine Fishing," is the catch-all bucket of U.S. commercial fishing: it covers businesses that harvest marine life from the wild that is neither finfish nor shellfish — chiefly bloodworms and sandworms (dug for bait), wild seaweed such as rockweed and dulse, natural sea sponges, and sea cucumbers, plus historical oddities like frog, terrapin, and turtle "fishing" that are now largely defunct or legally protected [1][3].

Why it matters to an investor: these are small but genuinely differentiated niches. They sell into markets a typical seafood buyer never touches — recreational fishing bait, natural fertilizer and plant "biostimulants," health-food sea vegetables, spa and craft sponges, and East Asian luxury delicacies. Several command premium, hard-to-substitute prices. But the honest headline is that this is a cottage industry: overwhelmingly private, owner-operated, geographically concentrated (Maine and Florida do most of it), and tiny in dollar terms.

• Public-market way in: essentially none. There is no U.S.-listed "other marine fishing" pure-play. The only listed exposure is highly indirect, through ingredient and specialty-chemical companies that buy seaweed extracts on global markets (Section 4). Large diversified seafood names that a stock screen surfaces harvest finfish and shellfish, which this code explicitly excludes.
• Private way in: this is where the industry actually lives — buying, starting, or backing a licensed harvesting operation, a bait or seaweed dealer-processor, or a branded sea-vegetable, supplement, or fertilizer company. Most operators are sole proprietors and small family firms.

The central question here is not "is seafood demand growing." It is whether an operator has lawful, durable access to a productive resource (a license, a quota, a stretch of shoreline) and can convert that access into cash flow despite biological, regulatory, weather, and labor risk.

2. What it is and how it's structured

In scope (the real commercial activity today):

• Marine worms — bloodworms (Glycera dibranchiata) and sandworms (Nereis virens), dug by hand from tidal mudflats and sold as premium fishing bait [6][7].
• Wild seaweed — mainly rockweed (Ascophyllum nodosum), plus kelp and dulse, cut or raked from the intertidal zone for fertilizer, animal feed, supplements, and edible "sea vegetables" [8].
• Natural sponges — dived and hooked from Gulf of Mexico waters, centered on Tarpon Springs, Florida [11].
• Sea cucumbers — echinoderms dragged or dived, dried, and exported to Asia as a luxury food [13].

What it explicitly excludes (adjacent NAICS codes — this matters, because it makes the category far smaller than the word "fishing" suggests) [17]:

• Finfish (cod, tuna, salmon, etc.) → NAICS 114111, Finfish Fishing.
• Shellfish — clams, oysters, crabs, lobster, shrimp, and sea urchins → NAICS 114112, Shellfish Fishing. Sea urchins, despite the popular image, count as shellfish, not here [4].
• Farming of any aquatic life → finfish farming/hatcheries NAICS 112511, shellfish farming NAICS 112512, and other aquaculture (farmed seaweed, sea cucumber, etc.) NAICS 112519 [5]. This is the critical line: harvesting wild rockweed is 114119, but growing kelp on ropes is aquaculture. The fast-growing, venture-funded seaweed-farming activity is therefore not in this code (Sections 8 and 10).
• Downstream handling — seafood processing and packaging NAICS 311710, and fish/seafood merchant wholesalers NAICS 424460 — sit in their own codes, though in practice the same small firms often harvest and process [17].

Ownership mix: almost entirely private and small. At the harvest level the industry is thousands of independent, self-employed license-holders — worm diggers, seaweed cutters, sponge divers — using hand tools, dive gear, and small boats. Above them sit a smaller number of privately held dealers and processors (bait shippers, seaweed processors, sponge-packing houses) that buy the raw catch, add value, and reach end markets. No governments or large corporations own the harvest; the largest single processor, Acadian Seaplants, is privately held [9].

3. How big it is

Our ground-truth federal business statistics describe an employer footprint that is genuinely tiny [2]:

The Small Business Administration (SBA) sets the "small" revenue threshold at $11.5 million in average annual receipts [3] — a ceiling almost every operator in this industry sits far below. Our data give no revenue, catch volume, vessel count, assets, or profit for the code; those should not be back-solved from payroll, and no suppressed value is stated here.

The undercount caveat is large here — read it before you judge the size. County Business Patterns (CBP) counts only employer establishments — firms that run a payroll [2]. Wild-capture fishing is dominated by self-employed harvesters who file as sole proprietors and hire no employees; these "nonemployer" operators are invisible in the table above. (The Census Bureau publishes a separate Nonemployer Statistics series, but our supplied data contain no 114119 nonemployer count or receipts, so we do not fill the gap with an invented number [18].) The gap is not marginal:

• Maine alone licensed roughly 800 active marine-worm harvesters as of 2019, and the worm fishery paid about $8.7 million to harvesters in 2020 — making it Maine's fifth most valuable fishery by dockside value [6][7]. That single state fishery's ex-vessel (dockside) value is comparable to the entire national payroll CBP reports for the whole code.
• Add Maine's wild seaweed harvest (about 15 million pounds in 2022, mostly rockweed [8]), Florida's sponge fishery, and small sea-cucumber landings, and the true active workforce runs well into four figures.

So the 127-establishment, 238-employee figure counts mainly the dealers and processors with payroll, not the harvesters. (The implied ~$125,000 average payroll per counted employee is unusually high for fishing labor — consistent with the counted firms skewing toward processing and management, not the diggers and divers.) No single official national landings total is published for this niche; summing the known state fisheries suggests the whole category's dockside value is plausibly in the low tens of millions of dollars a year — a forward-looking estimate, not an official figure — spread across more than a thousand mostly part-time or seasonal harvesters. For scale, all U.S. commercial fishing landed 8.4 billion pounds worth $5.1 billion in 2023; 114119 is a rounding error inside that total, and that $5.1 billion is emphatically not revenue for this code [19].

4. The investable universe

There are no U.S. public-company pure-plays in Other Marine Fishing. This is the cleanest possible example of a fragmented, privately owned, owner-operator industry. The table shows the players that actually exist, plus the only (very indirect) public angle.

The IFF line (NYSE = New York Stock Exchange) is illustrative, not a recommendation: alginate and carrageenan buyers source seaweed from global suppliers — much of it farmed and imported — so no listed company derives a material share of revenue from U.S. "other marine fishing." Direct exposure is private by necessity.

A disambiguation worth making. An investor searching "U.S. fishing stocks" will surface large diversified seafood companies — publicly, Dongwon Industries (Korea Exchange: 006040; parent of the StarKist tuna brand) [22], Nissui (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 1332; owner of Glacier Fish Company and UniSea) [23], Austevoll Seafood (Oslo Stock Exchange: AUSS) [24], Premium Brands Holdings (Toronto Stock Exchange: PBH; owner of Clearwater Seafoods via a 50/50 venture with Mi'kmaq First Nations communities) [25], and High Liner Foods (Toronto: HLF, a processor-marketer) [26]; privately, Trident Seafoods [27], Cooke Inc. (Wanchese, Icicle) [28], Pacific Seafood [29], Silver Bay Seafoods (fishermen-owned) [30], and American Seafoods (at-sea pollock/hake catcher-processor) [31]. None of these belong to 114119. They harvest, farm, and process finfish and shellfish (NAICS 114111/114112 and the aquaculture codes) — activities this code excludes. They are seafood exposure, not other-marine-fishing exposure; do not treat them as a proxy for this niche.

Private company financials are generally thin. Real private access to the segment runs through direct equity in a harvesting or processing business, permit/quota/license purchases where transferable, vessel or asset-backed lending, or backing a branded sea-vegetable, supplement, or fertilizer company.

5. How the money works

Owners make money two distinct ways, and the economics differ sharply by role.

Harvesters (the license-holders). Income is simply volume harvested × ex-vessel price, minus fuel, gear, and license costs ("ex-vessel," or dockside, is the price paid to the harvester at first sale). Capital needs are low — a tined hoe for worms, a small boat and rake for rockweed, dive gear for sponges — so the binding constraints are the biological resource, the harvest license/quota, and physical endurance. Pricing is per-unit and granular: worm shops paid roughly $0.35 per bloodworm and $0.18–0.20 per sandworm as of 2019 [7]; Key West sponges averaged under $2 per piece across 2020–2023 [12]. Work is seasonal, tidal, weather-dependent, and grueling, and there are no economies of scale at the individual level.

Dealers and processors (the payroll firms). These buy the raw catch at the dock or beach, then grade, dry, pack, and distribute it — bait to tackle shops, seaweed to fertilizer/supplement/food buyers, sponges to spa and craft channels, sea cucumbers to Asian exporters. Their margin comes from value-added processing, branding, and distribution reach, and their key assets are buyer relationships and the cold-chain/processing capacity individual harvesters lack. Processing smooths some harvest volatility through product mix and inventory, but adds fixed costs, food-safety obligations, and working-capital needs.

The industry-appropriate lens is commodity price cycles plus resource abundance. Like all wild capture, revenue is capped by what the ecosystem and the regulator allow: quotas, seasons, and stock health set a hard ceiling on volume, so growth has to come from higher unit prices (premium branding, export niches, organic/edible positioning) rather than from expanding output. These fisheries are prone to boom-and-bust — Maine's sea-cucumber landings spiked above 9 million pounds around 2000, then collapsed to roughly half a million pounds worth about $162,000 by 2014 as the resource and markets turned [13]. Access rights (limited-entry licenses) are the durable asset; the catch itself is a cyclical commodity.

6. What drives demand

Demand is niche-specific, which is the whole point of this category:

• Recreational saltwater fishing — the size of the sport-fishing bait market drives worm prices; worms ship nationwide and abroad as premium natural bait [6][7].
• Natural and regenerative agriculture — seaweed goes into fertilizers and plant biostimulants. The global seaweed-fertilizer market was about $1.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach ~$3.6 billion by 2034, with North America contributing roughly $0.7 billion in 2024; alginate-based products are the largest ingredient segment [15].
• Health, wellness, and food — edible sea vegetables (dulse, kelp), supplements, and pet products ride plant-based and functional-food trends [8].
• Industrial hydrocolloids — alginates from brown seaweed serve as food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic texturizers, a steady global demand base [15].
• East Asian luxury seafood — dried sea cucumber is one of China's classic luxury delicacies and a traditional-Chinese-medicine (TCM) tonic; China and Hong Kong take about 82% of global sea-cucumber imports, with high-grade product exceeding $1,500 per kilogram [14].
• Specialty/craft demand and tourism — natural sponges sell into spa, cosmetic, and craft niches; in Tarpon Springs the sponge story drives an estimated ~$20 million in annual tourism against roughly ~$2 million in sponge sales [11].

A note on the broader seafood backdrop: U.S. per-capita seafood consumption was about 19.1 pounds in 2023 and roughly 80% of U.S. seafood is imported [19]. That import reliance cuts both ways — it rewards domestic, traceable, locally sourced product, and it exposes every domestic harvester to cheaper imports, tariffs, and exchange rates.

7. Regulation

• Primarily state-managed. Unlike the federally managed finfish and shellfish stocks (governed under the Magnuson-Stevens Act through regional councils), these niche fisheries are governed mostly at the state level — Maine's Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and Florida's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) set licenses, quotas, seasons, gear rules, and minimum sizes [6][13]. Many are limited-entry or closed-access; Maine's sea-cucumber drag fishery had just six licensed boats in 2019 [13].
• Property rights — a defining issue for seaweed. In Ross v. Acadian Seaplants (2019 ME 45), Maine's Supreme Judicial Court ruled that intertidal rockweed is the private property of the adjoining upland landowner, not a public-trust resource. Commercial harvesters in Maine now need landowner permission to cut rockweed — a structural constraint on the largest wild-seaweed segment [10].
• Endangered species and trade controls. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) effectively ended turtle and terrapin "fishing" and can be decisive wherever protected animals are involved — the Census index examples (turtle, terrapin, frog) do not mean those activities are legally available today [20][21]. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) constrains trade in some sea-cucumber species, and the federal Lacey Act penalizes illegal harvest and trafficking.
• Vessel safety. The boat-based segments (sponge diving, sea-cucumber dragging) fall under U.S. Coast Guard commercial fishing-vessel safety rules — equipment, examination, and boarding requirements [32].
• Food safety and certification. Edible seaweed and food-grade products fall under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight, and organic/food positioning invites U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic and third-party certification.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

• Fragmented at harvest, consolidating at processing. Thousands of independent license-holders compete to dig, cut, and dive; a handful of processors aggregate them. In wild seaweed, Acadian Seaplants is the dominant buyer/processor across the North Atlantic [9]. Sponge processing concentrates in Tarpon Springs, and edible-seaweed branding sits with a few small Maine houses.
• Barriers to entry are unusual. They are not capital — they are access: limited-entry licenses, landowner permission (post-Ross, for rockweed), local tacit knowledge of tides and grounds, and buyer relationships. These protect incumbents more than any factory would.
• Aquaculture is the structural competitor. Farmed seaweed (NAICS 112519, outside this code) is scaling fast — Atlantic Sea Farms' partner network harvested a record 1.3 million pounds of farmed kelp in 2024, paying ~$1 million to about 40 fishing families [8][16]. Farmed and imported product increasingly competes with wild harvest on price and reliability, and farmed sea cucumber does the same in Asian markets. Over time, value and capital are migrating from wild capture toward cultivation.
• Import and substitute competition. Cheap imported seaweed (much from Asia) pressures commodity uses, and synthetic sponges cap natural-sponge volumes.

9. Risks

• Resource and climate risk. Overharvest and stock collapse are real and recent (sea cucumber). The warming Gulf of Maine is shifting species ranges and stressing kelp; invasive green crabs and disease add pressure. Because output is resource-capped, a bad stock year is a hard revenue ceiling.
• Regulatory and property-rights risk. Quota cuts, closures, ESA/CITES listings, and rulings like Ross v. Acadian can shrink the harvestable base overnight [10][13].
• Market concentration risk. Some segments depend on a single narrow demand pool — sea cucumber on Chinese luxury demand (exposed to tariffs, geopolitics, and conservation crackdowns), worms on recreational-fishing participation, natural sponges on discretionary spa/craft spending against synthetic substitutes [14].
• Labor risk. The workforce is aging, seasonal, and doing physically punishing manual work; recruitment is hard.
• Investability risk. No public liquidity, no standardized financials, thin public data (the undercount problem in Section 3), and highly illiquid private ownership. This is small-business/lifestyle-business territory, not a scalable, exit-friendly asset class.

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes. Effectively none directly. The only listed exposure is tangential — global ingredient and specialty-chemical firms (e.g., NYSE: IFF) that use seaweed-derived hydrocolloids, or agricultural-input and supplement companies touching biostimulants — and in every case U.S. wild harvest is an immaterial slice of a globally sourced input. The diversified seafood tickers in Section 4 are not substitutes: they are finfish/shellfish businesses outside this code. Do not expect a stock to track this industry.

Private routes (where the real ownership is):

• Operate or buy a harvesting business — acquire licenses and equipment for worms, wild seaweed, sponges, or sea cucumbers. Low capital, but returns gated by resource, quota, and physical labor.
• Own the dealer/processor layer — bait shippers, seaweed processing, sponge packing, or a branded sea-vegetable/supplement/fertilizer company, where value-added margin and distribution reach live.
• Back the blue-economy adjacency — most venture, impact, and small private-equity (PE) capital aimed at "seaweed" is actually going to aquaculture (NAICS 112519) — farmed kelp for food, biostimulants, feed additives, and packaging — not wild capture. If the thesis is seaweed growth, cultivation is the scalable expression; wild harvest is the artisanal, premium one.

Whatever the route, underwriting should center on the durability of legal access: license/permit terms and transferability, quota and landowner-permission rules, stock-assessment history, customer and buyer concentration, and the seasonal working-capital swing.

Near-term drivers and outlook (forward-looking). Wild-harvest volumes look flat-to-declining, pressed by climate stress, resource limits, and regulation — so value growth has to come from branding, value-added processing, and premium export niches, not tonnage. Structural tailwinds for seaweed (sustainable agriculture, functional foods, bio-packaging) are real but increasingly captured by farmers, not wild harvesters. Sea-cucumber upside is tied to resilient Asian luxury demand but capped by overfishing and tightening trade rules. The worm and sponge fisheries look like stable, low-growth cottage niches. Net judgment: Other Marine Fishing is a small, fragmented, privately held, owner-operator industry with a few genuinely premium pockets — attractive as a niche private business or specialty brand, but not a scalable public-market opportunity. Volume growth alone is not an investment thesis here.

---

Sources

1. NAICS Association / U.S. Census Bureau, "NAICS Code 114119 — Other Marine Fishing" (2022 definition and index examples). https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?code=114119
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, NAICS 114119 (establishments, employment, payroll; employer-only series), 2023. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
3. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards, NAICS 114119 ($11.5 million), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
4. Class Codes / NAICS Association, "NAICS Code 114112 — Shellfish Fishing" (includes sea urchins), 2022. https://classcodes.com/lookup/naics-code-114112/
5. NAICS Association, "NAICS 112519 — Other Aquaculture" (seaweed/animal aquaculture), 2022. https://naicslist.com/naics/112519
6. Maine Department of Marine Resources, "Marine Worms" (fishery overview and value), 2024. https://www.maine.gov/dmr/fisheries/commercial/fisheries-by-species/worms-marine
7. Downeast Fisheries Trail / Maine Sea Grant, "Marine Worms" (harvester count, per-worm prices, $8.7M 2020 value). http://www.downeastfisheriestrail.org/fisheries-now/marine-worms/
8. National Fisherman, "Maine seaweed landings, value grow as southern kelp forests decline" (~15M lbs wild seaweed, 2022; Maine seaweed companies), 2024. https://www.nationalfisherman.com/northeast/maine-seaweed-landings-value-grow-as-southern-kelp-forests-decline
9. Living on Earth, "Rockweed" (Acadian Seaplants: ~400 employees, 6 plants, Maine mechanical harvester since 2016). https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=00-P13-00049&segmentID=8
10. Justia, "Ross v. Acadian Seaplants, Ltd., 2019 ME 45" (rockweed is private property of the intertidal landowner), 2019. https://law.justia.com/cases/maine/supreme-court/2019/2019-me-45.html
11. Farm Flavor, "A Deep Dive Into the Tarpon Springs Sponge Industry" (~$2M sponge sales, ~$20M tourism). https://farmflavor.com/florida/a-deep-dive-into-the-tarpon-springs-sponge-industry/
12. University of Florida / IFAS Extension, "For the love of sponges!" (Key West/Marathon: <$2/piece, 2020–2023), 2024. https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/monroeco/2024/03/26/for-the-love-of-sponges/
13. Maine Department of Marine Resources, "Sea Cucumbers in Maine" (landings history, 2014 value ~$162K, 6 boats in 2019). https://www.maine.gov/dmr/fisheries/commercial/fisheries-by-species/sea-cucumbers
14. ScienceDirect / Marine Policy, "Decadal changes in value of dried sea cucumbers (bêche-de-mer) in Hong Kong markets" (China/HK ≈82% of imports; premium >$1,500/kg), 2024. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X24004500
15. Market.us, "Seaweed Fertilizers Market" ($1.7B in 2024 → $3.6B by 2034; North America ~$0.7B; alginate leading segment), 2024. https://market.us/report/seaweed-fertilizers-market/
16. Global Seafood Alliance / Responsible Seafood Advocate, "Maine seaweed-farming network harvests a record 1.3 million pounds in 2024" (adjacent aquaculture context), 2024. https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/maine-seaweed-farming-network-harvests-a-record-1-3-million-pounds-in-2024/
17. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Manual" (definition and excluded adjacent codes: 114111, 114112, 112511, 112512, 112519, 311710, 424460), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
18. U.S. Census Bureau, "Nonemployer Statistics Tables" (self-employed/no-payroll series; no 114119 figure supplied here), 2023. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics/data/tables.html
19. NOAA Fisheries, "Fisheries of the United States" (2023: 8.4B lbs / $5.1B all U.S. commercial landings; ~19.1 lb per-capita consumption; ~80% imports). https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/resource/document/fisheries-united-states-reports
20. NOAA Fisheries, "Marine Mammal Protection Act." https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/marine-mammal-protection/marine-mammal-protection-act
21. NOAA Fisheries, "Endangered Species Act." https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/endangered-species-conservation/endangered-species-act
22. Dongwon Group, "Dongwon Industries" (global fishing fleet; StarKist parent; Korea Exchange: 006040), 2025. https://www.dongwon.com/en/business/dongwon-industries
23. Nissui Corporation, "Nissui Group Integrated Report 2025" (marine products; Glacier Fish Company, UniSea; Tokyo: 1332), 2025. https://www.nissui.co.jp/english/ir/ir_library/pdf/2025_integrated_report_en_a4all.pdf
24. Austevoll Seafood ASA, "Annual Report 2024" (wild catch, fishmeal/oil, aquaculture; Oslo: AUSS), 2024. https://www.auss.no/investor/results-webcast/2024/annual-report-2024/
25. Premium Brands Holdings, "Completion of the Acquisition of Clearwater Seafoods" (50/50 with Mi'kmaq communities; Toronto: PBH), 2021. https://premiumbrandsholdings.com/pdf/press-releases/2021-01-25-press-release-Clearwater.pdf
26. High Liner Foods, "Structure & Governance" (North American frozen-seafood processor; Toronto: HLF). https://www.highlinerfoods.com/structure-governance/
27. Trident Seafoods, "Trident Overview" (family-owned, vertically integrated wild Alaska seafood). https://tridentseafoods.com/about-us/trident-overview
28. Cooke Seafood, "About Cooke" (private group; Wanchese, Icicle Seafoods; wild + aquaculture). https://cookeseafood.com/about-cooke/
29. Pacific Seafood, "About Us" (family-owned harvesting, processing, distribution, aquaculture). https://www.pacificseafood.com/about-us/
30. Silver Bay Seafoods (fishermen-owned; ~600 fishermen; 13 domestic processing facilities). https://silverbayseafoods.com/
31. American Seafoods, "Sustainability Report 2023" (at-sea catcher-processor; wild Alaska pollock, Pacific hake), 2023. https://www.americanseafoods.com/media/rkpjoshz/asc-sustainability-report-2023.pdf
32. United States Coast Guard, "Fishing Vessel Safety" (commercial vessel equipment, examination, boarding rules). https://www.dco.uscg.mil/FishingVesselSafety/