#menhaden

Excerpt from this Washington Post story:

For 15 years, I’ve launched my bay boat, the Bayou Belle, into Long Island Sound before sunrise, chasing striped bass like generations of coastal fishermen before me. But lately, the water feels empty. The surface no longer shimmers with baitfish. The gulls don’t dive. Everyone at the marina says the same thing: The stripers just aren’t here anymore.

The stripers didn’t vanish on their own. The food that sustains them went first.

Menhaden — also known as pogies or bunker — are small oily fish that feed nearly everything in the Atlantic. They are the foundation of the East Coast’s marine food web, fueling striped bass, bluefish, tuna, whales and seabirds. Yet each year, a single industrial operation hauls out hundreds of millions of pounds of them — not to feed humans but to grind them down into oil and meal for aquaculture, supplements and animal food, much of it for export.

Omega Protein, a U.S. subsidiary of Canada’s global seafood company Cooke Inc., contracts with an affiliated fleet of about 30 fishing boats along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico. Guided by spotter planes and GPS, these ships pull nets nearly four football fields long to trap the menhaden; in 2022, nearly 300 million pounds of the fish were essentially vacuumed out of the Atlantic for reduction alone. On the East Coast, the ships’ haul goes to Reedville, Virginia — home to the last menhaden-reduction plant on the Atlantic Seaboard.

Years ago, historian H. Bruce Franklin, author of “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” called menhaden exactly that. He was right. And if their decline continues, striped bass could be next to disappear — just as Atlantic cod once did.

Brazilian Menhaden Brevoortia aurea

A fish from the western Atlantic Ocean. Menhaden are omnivorous filter feeders, feeding by straining plankton and algae from water. Along with oysters, which filter water on the seabed, menhaden play a key role in the food chain in estuaries and bays

Brazilian menhaden!

Osprey in the lower Chesapeake Bay have been experiencing nest failure, leading to a reproductive rate comparable to during the DDT crisis. But unlike during DDT, reproductive failure occurs not at hatching but while young are in the nest.

The culprit? Overfishing of menhaden (a fish species), which Osprey depend on in the lower, more saline portion of the Bay.

"The current fish availability is not high enough to allow osprey to reproduce sustainably.  Their young are starving in the nest – most within the first week after hatching."

The menhaden fishery is controversial. A popular bait fish for striped bass and other sportfishing, it is also crucial to many birds of prey along the coast.

In contrast to the lower Bay, Osprey in the upper bay rely on a mix of catfish, shad, and other species. These Osprey are experiencing stable population growth rates.

Bald Eagles, which often kleptoparasitize Ospreys, are also doing well. They are at total capacity in the region: essentially every possible territory is occupied.