Tales of a Small, But Crucial, Fish

摘要

At first sight, The Most Important Fish in the Sea appears to belong to that lineage which earlier gave us accounts of cod [the fish that changed the world (1)1, American shad [the founding fish (2)], and Patagonian toothfish, also known as Chilean seabass [the perfect fish (3)]. These fish were all important because of their impacts, past or present, on people's diets. But Atlantic menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus) is really different from cod, shad, and toothfish, because it is a fish that we do not eat and likely never will. Rather, it is eaten by the fishes we like to catch and eat. Thus, the conflicts about and around this fish are different from the conflicts about others, where different people (the French versus the English, the line fishers versus the ones using trawls, etc.) competed for access to wholesome food fish.