Menhaden

Uh, how are you doing today? Dr.

Alt, thank you so much for taking a little bit of your precious time and talking to us about Menhaden today.

How are you doing today, sir? Doing fine.

Thanks, Tony.

And they said, well, you know, how will we ever know? And I just come back from Guatemala tagging billfishes with these electronic tags, pop-up tags, small computers that record every second depth, light level, salinity, and position, right? It's incredible technology.

So we started tagging fish and we tagged about over the course of the study, about 450 tarpon with these tags.

But the interesting thing about their movement seasonally were they were correlated to heading into the bulk of the Menhaden population.

So the Gulf group, if you will, ends up going up to the Mississippi River, those coming through Florida and those coming around the Bay of Campeche through Mexico, Texas.

Yep.

A lot of that comes from Menhaden.

And, and the thing is, the controversy is like no one's saying, "Hey, shut down pogie fishing."

Sure.

Chileans arrived with nitrate of soda.

Local fishermen added bone from schools of Menhaden.

Giant lead-lined vats held acidic brews that evaporated and hardened again in sunlight under glass roofs.

Wharves, dormitories, warehouses created an industrialized waterfront.

This is the last one.

And so they're taking all the heat from whatever's going on with menhaden not being where osprey need them at the right time in June.

And so that, this is playing out on the national stage, Washington Post articles, New York Times articles, you know, Menhaden, the most important fish in the sea, ospreys are starving.

And it's true, the ospreys are starving and it moved up the coast into Long Island.

And this year, finally, Connecticut and Rhode Island saw really low productivity compared to normal.

You know, there was a three chick nest in Dennis and then out in Orleans, they seem to do better.

So it's not clear what's going on.

But Menhaden didn't show up in Buzzards Bay.

That was a request.

Menhaden has come up several times, and that's, we've definitely gotta cover the, that was Jasper.

What's he call himself, the Belgian Fish Guy? Let me go to his email real quick.

Yeah.