It’s the ‘most important fish in the sea.’ And it’s disappearing.

Mark Robichaux, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is a fisherman and author.

For 15 years, I’ve launched my bay boat, the Bayou Belle, into Long Island Sound before sunrise, chasing striped bass like generations of coastal fishermen before me. But lately, the water feels empty. The surface no longer shimmers with baitfish. The gulls don’t dive. Everyone at the marina says the same thing: The stripers just aren’t here anymore.

The stripers didn’t vanish on their own. The food that sustains them went first. Menhaden — also known as pogies or bunker — are small oily fish that feed nearly everything in the Atlantic. They are the foundation of the East Coast’s marine food web, fueling striped bass, bluefish, tuna, whales and seabirds. Yet each year, a single industrial operation hauls out hundreds of millions of pounds of them — not to feed humans but to grind them down into oil and meal for aquaculture, supplements and animal food, much of it for export.

Omega Protein, a U.S. subsidiary of Canada’s global seafood company Cooke Inc., contracts with an affiliated fleet of about 30 fishing boats along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico. Guided by spotter planes and GPS, these ships pull nets nearly four football fields long to trap the menhaden; in 2022, nearly 300 million pounds of the fish were essentially vacuumed out of the Atlantic for reduction alone. On the East Coast, the ships’ haul goes to Reedville, Virginia — home to the last menhaden-reduction plant on the Atlantic Seaboard.

Years ago, historian H. Bruce Franklin, author of “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” called menhaden exactly that. He was right. And if their decline continues, striped bass could be next to disappear — just as Atlantic cod once did.

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