Working for a living on the coast - menhaden fishing

Menhaden And The Chantey Men

Native Americans may have used menhaden for fertilizer before the European settlement of North America. Colonists soon recognized the value of whole menhaden for fertilizer, and local seine fisheries gradually developed from New York to Maine.

Farmers applied 6,000 to 8,000 fish per acre. The use of whole fish as fertilizer continued into the nineteenth century.

Union soldiers returning home from North Carolina and Virginia after the Civil War provided anecdotal reports on the abundance of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay and coastal North Carolina, sparking interest in a southern fishery, which soon developed.

Here, according to John Frye's The Men All Singing, is how menhaden were caught when chanteys were still in use, forty years ago and more:

From the crowsnest of the fishboat - perhaps an older wooden ship, 120-foot long, bought from the military after World War I and converted from steam to diesel - the captain, the mate, and the striker watched the water.

When one of them saw the "whips", the tell-tale ripples made by a school of menhaden swimming near the surface, the captain called out, and the striker rushed down the ratlines to his small, round-bottomed drive boat, which was dropped overboard - with him in it.

The striker rowed to the far edge of the school and signalled the captain, still aloft, who then called "Lower 'em down, boys!" When the purseboats hit the water, sixteen to twenty men jumped into each and began rowing towards the striker, who directed them, all the time watching and, if necessary, herding the fish by striking the water with his oar, sometimes chanting to them "Play fish, play fish, play .. . ."

At his signal, the boats separated, and certain crewmen began deftly paying out the purse net while the others continued rowing, with the captain and the mate each steering his boat with oar or tiller.

When they had encircled the fish, the strongest man on the captain's boat dropped a heavy "tom" overboard, which closed the bottom of the net like a purse as it sank.

The striker hurried around the edge of the seine "pulling corks" to keep the fish from escaping. Oars, fastened them to the boats by lanyards, were tossed overboard, and the bunt pullers began hauling in loose fathoms of net. If everyone had done their work well the fish were caught. The pilot then brought the big boat alongside, "easing its port side against the angled sterns of of the purse boats," completing a triangle around the seine.

Then the hard work began. Every man in each purse boat took hold of the net and began pulling it in further, packing the fish in preparation for the dip-net that would bail the bunkers into the big ship's hold. With a light "set" of, say, fifty thousand fish, the men could "harden the net" with little exertion. But with a heavy set, while the first few yards of net might come up easy, "it soon came to the point where muscle was not enough." Then the captain would call for a chantey.

The chantey leader sang out and the men joined, with a pull and a heave to gain a foot or so. Another verse, another foot. Each pull, they'd sing. The verses came out of the chanteyman's store of couplets built up over years of fishing and hearing chanteymen before him. Within this store was room for variation - addition of a word, a half-line, a line, either about the immediate situation or particular person. This ability, with the chanteyman's own flexibility and invention, was so important that a good chanteyman was a prize.

"When that heavy set came, when the purse boats had surrounded two hundred thousand or more fish and all knew there was work ahead to get them into the hold before they died to become dead weight, inspiration came to the chanteyman.

The men 'went crazy' over the feel of the net, in delight of doing what they loved and singing about it. They also 'went crazy' thinking of the money in that net. The men leaned down with their hands and fingers in the net. The chanteyman sang and the men responded, and leaned back and pulled until their bodies were angling back toward the far gunwale.

The drama and sweetness of the verses were heightened by the noisy, obscene chatter between verses. They scolded each other for not pulling their weight or crowding. If the net came up a foot or two, they reset their hands and the chanteyman started a new verse. If not, he remained silent while the men tried to shift for a better pull. Then he sang again.

The primary use of menhaden changed from fertilizer to animal feed during the period following World War I. Scientists described the uses of menhaden during the late 1920s as follows: "... much is being used in mixed feeds for poultry, swine, and cattle and the amount going to fertilizer is steadily decreasing. Menhaden oil is used primarily in the manufacture of soap, linoleum, water proof fabrics, and certain types of paints.

Visit Watershed Radio and amazing menhaden for lots more . . .

What is causing the decline in menhaden? Unfortunately, like so many other species in the Chesapeake Bay, overfishing is the culprit. A recent article in the popular science magazine Discover describes menhaden as "the most important fish caught along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, exceeding the tonnage of all other species combined."

Picture: bushel baskets of blue crab and Atlantic menhaden on the deck. Overfishing is causing a decline in the menhaden population of the Chesapeake Bay. Picture courtesy of Michael Dowgiallo, Coastal Ocean Program, NOAA.

Humans, however, don't eat this oily fish, at least not directly. Menhaden are processed for their oil and as high protein feed for chicken, pigs, and cattle. They are also used as bait in commercial and recreational fishing. We indirectly eat menhaden when we eat fish such as swordfish, tuna, and bass, for which menhaden is an important food source.

An underwater vacuum cleaner

Menhaden themselves eat phytoplankton, microscopic plants that float in the water and are carried by waves, currents, and tides. Huge schools of menhaden swim with their mouths open, serving almost like a giant vacuum cleaner as they filter food from the water column. One menhaden can filter up to 7 gallons of water per minute through its gills, which have special structures called gill rakers to strain out food particles like a sieve.

The menhaden work in concert with oysters in remove the plankton; while the oysters filter the water at lower layers in the water column, the menhaden filter the upper layers. As they eat and are eaten, menhaden also remove large amounts of excess nitrogen and phosphorous.

Because menhaden eat so much phytoplankton, they help control algal growth, and with their decline, algal blooms become more likely. The menhaden's filter feeding also helps remove suspended particles from the water, so when there are fewer menhaden, the turbidity, or cloudiness, of the water will increase.

A keystone species: disproportionately important to community structure

By consuming so much phytoplankton and then being consumed by so many fish, birds, and marine mammals, menhaden are a crucial link in the Chesapeake Bay food chain. They have been described as a keystone species, a species that is disproportionately important to community structure and without which the community would change drastically. The role of menhaden as filter feeders becomes increasingly important as numbers of oysters in the Bay have dwindled. But now so are the menhaden. And so are the animals that depend on them as a food source.

Thanks to the Sierra Club and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC)