This weekend I had a surreal experience in Greenwich Bay. There was no wind, it was foggy and a light gentle rain was falling when I found myself in the middle of a large menhaden pod. It had a diameter of about 40 yards.
There were plenty of other pods (six that I found) in the same area, that were fifteen to thirty feet in diameter, but nothing this large. I miscalculated and gently drifted through this pod while fishing the edges. The pod was so large that when my boat was in the middle it was like being in the eye of a hurricane. Though there was no activity in the center, menhaden were swirling all around my boat with dorsal fins out of the water and an occasional bluefish crashing through the school. A menhaden pod this large in open water was something that I had not experienced in a long time.
These menhaden have been in Greenwich Bay for three weeks now. I also found them off Warwick Neck, Quidnesset Country Club and Quonset Point in North Kingstown. They were just about everywhere in the West Passage of Narragansett Bay. Last year menhaden commercial fishing boats were restricted from fishing north of Conimicut Light in the East Passage and not allowed to fish in Greenwich Bay with a boundary line from Warwick Light to Sandy Point. No official scientific proof but these efforts along with other regulations and the State’s commercial monitoring program seem to be working as the menhaden are thick in Greenwich Bay.
Why are menhaden important?
In a Rhode Island Saltwater Anglers Association (RISAA) newsletter article (www.risaa.org), Dan Pedro relates that “Menhaden serve as roving filters, converting algae into energy and thus reducing nutrient loads”. Pedro continues to say that Atlantic menhaden occupy two distinct types of feeding niches during their lifetime: they are size-selective plankton feeders as larvae, and filter feeders as juveniles and adults. An adult menhaden, through its unique filtering gills, is able to process up to 4 gallons of water per minute or a million gallons of water every 180 days. Multiply this by the number of menhaden in Greenwich Bay alone this year and this is an amazing amount of water being filtered, a reduction of nutrients means fewer algae blooms and ultimately more oxygen for all fish.
In addition, menhaden have a great value to both the commercial and recreational fishery. Commercial fishermen harvest them as bait for lobster traps as well as fish sold to bait shops for recreational anglers. Recreational anglers use menhaden to catch striped bass and bluefish. Menhaden are an important food source for striped bass and bluefish. In fact, in a Chesapeake Bay study conducted several years ago a reduction in the menhaden biomass led to malnourished striped bass, which led to disease, specifically mycobacteriosis. Mycobacteriosis is a disease that reduced the number of young fish in the Chesapeake, and a disease that can be transmitted to fishermen from handling fish with sores as they can enter a human body through a cut or open wound (visit www.noflukefishing.blogspot.com for additional articles on the topic).
Read the full article at the Warwick Beacon.
Analysis: While the article presents menhaden's role as filter feeders as a given, there are actually several indications that menhaden may not play as promintent a role in filter feeding as previously thought. A recent study by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) recently concluded that menhaden have little to no net impact on water quality.