• picture
  • picture
  • picture
  • picture
Public Radio's Environmental News Magazine (follow us on Google News)

Field Note: I’ll Take Menhaden

Published: December 16, 2022


By Mark Seth Lender


A herring gull glides above the herring (Photo: © Mark Seth Lender)

Menhaden fish once gathered in schools several miles long and were a common food for predators like sharks, sea birds, and bass. But after humans turned them into everything from supplements to fertilizer their numbers plummeted by roughly 90 percent. In Long Island Sound they’re finally bouncing back and Explorer in Residence Mark Seth Lender, witnesses their return.

The short term has undone the long term. Having largely run out of big fish we have turned to small fish, then smaller fish; and the fish we used to call trash fish and finally, krill. The problem being the big fish eat the little fish who eat the krill and things even smaller. We rip the guts out top to bottom. What then?

Against the tide of immediate gain, other sectors take the Long View. Notably, the safe harbor provided by the National Wildlife Refuge System. and the work of the occasional politician like the late great Gerry Studds or a genuinely non-self-interested NGO such as Pew Charitable Trust among the profoundly rare examples. Together, they have made heroic efforts to preserve the bottom of the food chain, menhaden being one of the more successful success stories. I have spent my entire life in proximity to the Atlantic and these past three, four years are the only time I’ve ever seen menhaden in the hundreds of thousands, their normal state, one that had persisted for millennia.

I am not alone. It is as reported here quite true, the herring gulls hadn’t seen it either. The darting shadow of fish that the gulls’ moving forms provoked, they ignored. Until all of a sudden they figured out what it was, and what to do with it.

Back to Mark Seth Lender Field Notes


Links

Hear Mark Seth Lender's piece, "I’ll Take Menhaden"

Author and photographer Mark Seth Lender’s website

Special thanks to Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge

 

Living on Earth wants to hear from you!

Living on Earth
62 Calef Highway, Suite 212
Lee, NH 03861
Telephone: 617-287-4121
E-mail: comments@loe.org

Newsletter [Click here]

Donate to Living on Earth!
Living on Earth is an independent media program and relies entirely on contributions from listeners and institutions supporting public service. Please donate now to preserve an independent environmental voice.

Newsletter
Living on Earth offers a weekly delivery of the show's rundown to your mailbox. Sign up for our newsletter today!

Sailors For The Sea: Be the change you want to sea.

The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment: Committed to protecting and improving the health of the global environment.

Contribute to Living on Earth and receive, as our gift to you, an archival print of one of Mark Seth Lender's extraordinary wildlife photographs. Follow the link to see Mark's current collection of photographs.

Buy a signed copy of Mark Seth Lender's book Smeagull the Seagull & support Living on Earth