After the Mayflower landed on Cape Cod, Tisquantum—a Native American better known as Squanto, who lived among the nearby Wompanoag tribe—taught the Pilgrims how to properly fish in Massachusetts’s estuaries. Seafood, in fact, likely played a much larger role in the first Thanksgiving feast than the fare we typically enjoy today.
But Tisquantum taught the Pilgrims another important trick: how to plant some of their catch in agricultural fields. An acre of corn also seeded with fish has been said to yield three times as many ears. So early colonists buried river herring, shad, and undoubtedly menhaden, another fish in the Culpeidae family. Rhode Island’s Narragansett Tribe called this creature munnawhatteaug: “that which manures” or “he enriches the land.” Pogy, another nickname for menhaden, comes from the Maine Abenaki Indians’ paughagen, which also means “fertilizer.”
Menhaden act as fertilizer in more ways than one. They also help more generally to absorb and broadly redistribute nutrients in the coastal ecosystem. What’s crucial is that, unlike other species in the herring family, they only eat phytoplankton. In schools an acre in size, each menhaden can filter 4 to 8 gallons of water a minute, harnessing the energy that microscopic algae gather from the sun. When they’re eaten or decompose, they pass that energy through the food web.
Since few other fish capitalize on algae so profoundly and menhaden spawn prolifically, they became extraordinarily abundant on the Atlantic Coast. Menhaden once possibly exceeded all other East Coast fish combined in weight. Their huge schools were truly an edenic vision, if there ever was one. When Captain John Smith, the founder of Jamestown, Virginia, sailed through a school of menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay, he told of “an aboundance of fish, lying so thicke with their heads above the water, as for want of nets (or barge driving among them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but found it a bad instrument to catch fish with.”
But today, like so many other fish, the Atlantic menhaden has been overharvested. Estimated population levels have plummeted to just 10 percent of what they were historically. You’ll never find a menhaden on your plate—too bony and oily—but in the United States the fishery is second in weight only to Alaskan pollock. A company called Omega Protein harvests roughly 80 percent of the catch, which is then rendered as fertilizer, fish and livestock feed, additions to cosmetic products, and dietary supplements (since menhaden are rich in omega-3 fatty acids). The rest is used as bait in lobster and crab pots, or by non-commercial anglers who “snag” menhaden to hook on their lines in hopes of luring a bluefish or striped bass, which follow the schools.
Read the full article at the NRDC's Switchboard blog.
Analysis: The article is incorrect in claiming that menhaden are overharvested. The most recent stock assessment from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) concluded that menhaden are not currently overfished. Slight overfishing did occur in 2008, but it was the only year in the last decade where overfishing occurred and was not sufficient to declare the fishery overfished.
The article also is misleading when it claims that menhaden levels are "10 percent of what they were historically." Menhaden are currently fished to around 10 percent of their Maximum Spawning Potential (MSP), which is an estimate of a theoretical unfished population. However, this is not by itself a sign of overfishing, as menhaden have previously been able to rebuild themselves at that level. There is also a poor correlation between MSP and menhaden recruitment.
The article also overstates menhaden's role as a fiter-feeder. While juvenile menhaden consume phytoplankton, adult menhaden consume zooplankton, and recent studies have suggested that menhaden have a negligible impact on water quality.