December 7, 2015 — The Chesapeake Bay may be the best-studied estuary in the world, but a group of scientists attending a recent workshop were surprised about how little they knew about what predatory fish eat.
After all, menhaden — dubbed by some as the “most important fish in the sea” would also be the “most important” fish in the Bay, right?
Apparently not. That honor, were one species to be singled out, might belong to the tiny bay anchovy — a fish that rarely grows more than 3–4 inches in length and typically doesn’t live longer than a year.
“They’re the most abundant fish in the Bay,” said Ed Houde, a fisheries scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who helped organize the workshop. “They’re really important in the Bay’s food web.”
An analysis of 12 years of Baywide diet information for five major predators prepared for the workshop found that bay anchovy was a significant portion of the diet for four of those species. Menhaden was important for only one, striped bass, and even for them, bay anchovy were more important.
“Menhaden came out not as high on the list as people thought it was going to be,” Houde said. “It was an important prey, but it certainly wasn’t in the top three or four.”
Even more significantly, the analysis showed that the Bay’s food web is less of a fish-eat-fish world than popularly thought, even among many scientists. A host of unheralded species, from worms to clams to crustaceans, are major food sources for the Chesapeake’s predatory fish.
Read the full story at Bay Journal