James Shelton’s Reviews > The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America > Status Update

This chapter describes how every other major fishery and many birds are affected by the loss of the Menhaden, with Striped Bass starving and wasting, crabs being eaten by rockfish because there are no menhaden, shad and herring being eaten by Bluefish for the same reason and mussels suffering because of algae blooms caused in parts by the lack of menhaden consuming plankton. Many other things lost by algae blooms.

Re-read the last chapter. It is amazing that arguments debunked in the 1890’s about menhaden, which have lived in great numbers for millions of years and are now reduced be 90%, are still used to distract from the effects of industrial fishing.

Read and interesting part. Sharks were created as the villains as early as the 1880’s to make the over fishing and bycatch seem like a good thing. Was this the reason for the movie Jaws?

Good information. Hearing how the fishing industry went from farmers catching abundant fish for fertilizer with homemade nets of flax they grew to massive industrial fishing taking so many.

I will not eat fish oil anymore even though that is a tiny part of the catch but use oil made from marine algae now.

Just read a great chapter telling of schools that were once as long as 42 miles, before industrial fishing, with each fish producing huge amounts of eggs and juveniles that live live zooplankton washing into marshes to live on phytoplankton and the abundance of marsh detritus before moving to the ocean and feeding the gannets and marine mammals.

Great historical descriptions of the abundance of fish when the first colonists came. Fish could be scooped up in baskets and there were so many menhaden that colonists and native Americans used them to fertilize corn fields. Every type of fish was abundant and the menhaden were the most abundant.

An important book for our time. Menhaden a the base of the food chain in the Chesapeake Bay and nearshore waters on the East Coast. They feed Ospreys, whales, seals, sport fish, gulls, terns and crabs. They also hold back harmful algae blooms killing the Bay. They had been reduced to %13 percent of there original numbers at the time of the writing of this book and are still crashing.