Here's a most extraordinary story most people have never heard of: the
Menhaden fish. It's unique to American waters and it does two things,
it cleans the water and it's a food source for the kind of fish we
like to eat. Sounds simple, right? Menhaden used to number in the
billions, perhaps trillions, and accounted for the unimaginable bounty
of the sea and crystal clear waters found by early settlers. But
having now been fished to the brink of extinction the loss of Menhaden
is directly responsible for huge dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and
the Chesapeake Bay, not to mention huge decreases in available game
and commercial fish.

As H. Bruce Franklin puts it in the title of his book, the Menhaden is
The Most Important Fish in the Sea. Bruce, a noted literary expert and
historian of American culture at Rutgers, tells this story in an
unforgettable way.

There's hope, though, and the Menhaden reduction industry, for all the
devastation it causes, is a very small one, probably incapable of
resisting determined political pressure to shut it down. The question
is, will people rally to demand action quickly enough? If the
reduction industry were banned within the next few years, the Menhaden
surely can recover due to their astonishing fertility. But if the
industry isn't banned the fish may well become extinct within a
decade.


http://www.electricpolitics.com/podc...ornucopia.html