A small ocean fish with silvery skin and oily flesh has retaken center stage in a long-running debate over fishing and ecosystem health in two of the nation’s most productive estuaries: the Chesapeake Bay and Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
Sport fishermen and environmentalists are again demanding that regulators do more to protect menhaden (pronounced men-HAY-den), a fish once so abundant it helped sustain entire ocean food chains — gobbled up by everything from Atlantic striped bass to Gulf of Mexico red drum.
Increasingly, however, advocates say menhaden are showing signs of stress in their core habitats, a condition some attribute to commercial fishing pressure in the lower Chesapeake Bay and along Louisiana’s brackish coast. A decline of menhaden in either region would mean more than another lost species for commercial and recreational fishermen. As with other forage fish like herring and shad, menhaden are central to the greater ocean ecosystem, providing sustenance for higher-order fish that fetch premium prices at seafood counters and restaurants.
The diminutive species was christened “the most important fish in the sea” by Rutgers University historian H. Bruce Franklin in a 2007 book of the same name, a status it still claims two decades later.
