Most Important Fish in the Sea (Audible Audio Edition) Bruce H Franklin Caravan Books
Download As PDF : Most Important Fish in the Sea (Audible Audio Edition) Bruce H Franklin Caravan Books
In this brilliant portrait of the oceans' unlikely hero, H. Bruce Franklin shows how menhaden have shaped America's national-and natural-history, and why reckless overfishing now threatens their place in both. Since Native Americans began using menhaden as fertilizer, this amazing fish has greased the wheels of U.S. agriculture and industry. By the mid-1870s, menhaden had replaced whales as a principal source of industrial lubricant, with hundreds of ships and dozens of factories along the eastern seaboard working feverishly to produce fish oil. Since the Civil War, menhaden have provided the largest catch of any American fishery.
Most Important Fish in the Sea (Audible Audio Edition) Bruce H Franklin Caravan Books
This book offers an excellent practical example of resilience thinking. It tells the history of the menhaden (or moss-bunker or just bunker) and the role it plays in the ecology, economy and society of the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Menhaden are a keystone species, the major food source for many of our favourite eating fish (I had a great bluefish at Hungry Mother in Cambridge MA last week) and an important filter feeder that plays a major role in keeping water clear and the bottom healthy. The menhaden is also an important economic species, directly as a source fertilizer, fish oil and animal feed, and as the main prey of commercially valuable fish. This book is a wonderful social history of this fish and the cascading crisis that overfishing has caused. It shows the folly of any resource management regime that targets single species independent of others - a general rule, resource management is systems management and trying to optimize for any single variable will degrade the resilience of the system overall. Out on the west coast, where I live most of the time, we try to manage salmon stocks more or less independent of forestry, mining and dams. This is contributing to the wild oscillations that are a sign of approaching collapse. A great book that gives an intuitive understanding of how ecosystems and economic systems are co-dependent. I would have liked an appendix with more data and formal modeling, but I understand this is not the purpose of the book.Product details
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Most Important Fish in the Sea (Audible Audio Edition) Bruce H Franklin Caravan Books Reviews
About 25 years ago, when I used to have the time to take a random vacation now and then, I was taking the ferry to Ocracoke Island at the southern end of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Last ferry of the day. It was night. Suddenly, the ferry was surrounded by an unfathomable number of leaping, flopping fish. And the school went on, and on and on. I was absolutely stunned. It was the sort of experience that pioneers talked about when seeing the endless herds of buffalo on the Plains.
I asked a local what kind of fish these amazing creatures were.
"Ah, they're just menhaden."
And that's the story on menhaden -- the amazing fish that everyone takes for granted. I bought this book (my wife "You're buying a book on WHAT?") partly because my long-ago experience made me curious, and partly because of an interest in fisheries issues.
And what a pleasure. First, I found out that, at least on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, menhaden really are the most important fish in the sea. They convert the phytoplankton (small floating plant critters) into high-energy flesh, and thus become the primary food source for various sport fish, including bluefish. They also filter an astonishing amount of water (4 gallons per minute per adult fish), ensuring that sunlight penetrates deep enough to nurture eelgrass and that decaying phytoplankton don't choke all the oxygen out of the water. Even their dying is important -- bluefish rush into the giant schools and tear menhaden to bits, and the chunks the bluefish miss are a primary food source for crabs.
That is, if we don't catch them all and feed them to pigs and chickens, which is pretty much what we've been trying to do in one form or another for a couple of centuries.
The other big surprise was what a great read this book is. I've read pretty much every book on fisheries written for the general audience in the last decade, and let me tell you, it's sometimes a grim task. Not this time. I actually stayed up until 2 a.m. to finish this book. It's great read, blending history, science, and the author's personal experience as a recreational fisherman.
Before reading the book, I had some knowledge of the fact that there was once a large fish processing industry of some sort on the East Coast -- in many towns locals will point out where the "fish plant" used to be. I didn't realize that it involved processing menhaden for fertilizer, oil, and animal feed.
This industry has dwindled to exactly one barely profitable firm, protected by the infamously boneheaded state legislature of Virginia. The author passionately argues that catching menhaden for processing should be banned. And unlike a lot of environmental books, this one actually ends on an up note -- a complete ban on catching menhaden for processing in New Jersey waters seems to have led to a relatively quick recovery of the species.
This summer, I took another short vacation near one of Deleware's inland bays. And I actually saw some juvenile menhaden in the bay (the way they flop out of the water is quite characteristic) and a few menhaden minnows (called "peanuts") schooling in the ocean. May there soon be many more.
Bruce Franklin has done saltwater ecology a monumental service by explaining the sea's utter reliance on a healthy menhaden population, and exposing a gross dereliction of duty on the part of "regulatory" agencies designed to protect the marine environment. The little fish that few have heard of, is crucial to the health of every species of shellfish and gamefish. The menhaden's unique ability to remove algae and phytoplankton from the water provides a cleansing effect that is of incalculable benefit to all sea creatures.
Largely unfettered by meaningful regulation, the menhaden reduction industry has systematically plundered and devastated the menhaden population, first along the north Atlantic coast, and then the mid Atlantic. Now the ecology of the Gulf coast is threatened by the wholesale plunder of their vital menhaden population.
Franklin provides numerous examples of how the industry, represented now primarily by Omega Protein, continues their rape of the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf coast even though a token and meaningless cap was put on the menhaden harvest in the Bay.
If you want to understand why we need to immediately shut down the destructive menhaden reduction fishery, get this book, read it, then get in touch with your legislators and regulators. Or join the Coastal Conservation Association and become active.
H. Bruce Franklin was a professor of mine at Rutgers in the 80's. Always a bit of a rebel and very outspoken, the book is no different. He states very clearly what any sport fisherman already knows, our Northeast fisheries are being destroyed and his evidence to support it is compelling. The history of the myriad of problems can get a bit repetitive, being restated several times early in the book, but I think this is purposely done to really make an impression. This is not a fast read. However, it is very informative and really needs to be studied. It has certainly changed my perception of the politics and economics of the fishery flesh-mining. I strongly recommend every avid fisherman read this book and get involved.
This book offers an excellent practical example of resilience thinking. It tells the history of the menhaden (or moss-bunker or just bunker) and the role it plays in the ecology, economy and society of the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Menhaden are a keystone species, the major food source for many of our favourite eating fish (I had a great bluefish at Hungry Mother in Cambridge MA last week) and an important filter feeder that plays a major role in keeping water clear and the bottom healthy. The menhaden is also an important economic species, directly as a source fertilizer, fish oil and animal feed, and as the main prey of commercially valuable fish. This book is a wonderful social history of this fish and the cascading crisis that overfishing has caused. It shows the folly of any resource management regime that targets single species independent of others - a general rule, resource management is systems management and trying to optimize for any single variable will degrade the resilience of the system overall. Out on the west coast, where I live most of the time, we try to manage salmon stocks more or less independent of forestry, mining and dams. This is contributing to the wild oscillations that are a sign of approaching collapse. A great book that gives an intuitive understanding of how ecosystems and economic systems are co-dependent. I would have liked an appendix with more data and formal modeling, but I understand this is not the purpose of the book.
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