October 13, 2015 — Here’s a statistic, which is a best-guess estimate, but nonetheless difficult to wrap one’s head around: On Tuesday, Oct. 6, there were 5.8 million pounds of menhaden swimming in the bay.
That isn’t too hard to imagine if you looked down from the Pawtuxet River Bridge the following day, or actually, as it turns out, just about any time in the last two weeks. What you would have seen are thousands upon thousands of fish. Most of them were juvenile menhaden averaging about three inches long. Mixed in the schools – so thick that they looked like carpets – were a few adults of about 11 inches. And then there were the predators – the cormorants, sea gulls, terns and bluefish and stripers – gorging themselves.
“The menhaden population has absolutely exploded this year,” says Christopher Deacutis.
Deacutis, supervisor of environmental science for the Department of Environmental Management, said large schools of the fish have been seen up and down the eastern seaboard, and there have been reports of humpback whales feeding off them last month in Long Island Sound. The whales haven’t been reported in Rhode Island waters, but Deacutis suspects the menhaden are the reason why schools of common dolphins have been spotted at the mouth of Narragansett Bay.