A Fish Oil Story

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”

The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain.

via www.nytimes.com

I recommend this thoughtful op-ed by friend of hello, typepad Paul Greenberg. I wish the New York Times' had come up with a more thoughtful image (perhaps a map or infographic?) to accompany this article than the Earth with a fish hook through it, but I guess subtlety is dead.

Comments

[David Veksler]

"For fish guys like me, this egregious privatization of what is essentially a public resource is shocking"

The reality is oppose from what the author claims: the fish stocks are a public, un-owned resource, and therefore everyone has an incentive to use them as fast as possible without regard to future supply. This public resource ought to be privatized to give the owners an incentive to preserve its value for the future.