Hold The River Banks Up

INTRODUCTION
Chris Staudinger
A single female Gulf Menhaden has the ability to produce twentythree
thousand eggs in one spawning season. The eggs are suspended
in cool offshore waters, sometimes four-hundred feet deep, where
they drift and hatch into skinny larvae. They have big heads, big eyes,
and big mouths. For four or five weeks, they drift out there and eat
microscopic floating plants.
There’s some debate about what happens when they are pushed closer
to shore. Some say they are washed up by the currents into shallower
waters; other say they can swim themselves in. In rushes and lulls, they
travel from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi Sound through the
Rigolets into Lake Pontchartrain and up through Pass Manchac. They
glitter and shine on the water and make it ripple up from underneath.
They’re heading for a warmer place where the water is still water, but
it’s a totally different world: the place where salt and freshwater meet.
This water is being mashed between other waters, rivers, lagoons, and
land. The land sloughs off into water. The bodies of plants are falling
apart into tiny-enough pieces that fall to the bottom and feed a world
of microscopic bugs. The bottom of the water and the top of the land
is an explosion of tiny life. The Gulf Menhaden finds shallow, quiet
cuts in these underwater jungles and eats all of it.
In the heat of this nursery, they don’t grow so much as transform.
They triple in size. Their heads get smaller and their bodies get fatter.
They swim and their gills expand into intricate hooked branches that
rake the water like a fishing net. They filter and snag invisible plants,
animals, and plastics. They grow a gizzard to handle all of the mud.
They are dull-colored and iridescent.
After a year, they emmigrate when they’re ready. In large schools, they
follow the same passes out into the Gulf. Sometimes they hybridize
with others from the Atlantic or the Yucatan.
894 million pounds of them are pulled from the water by humans
alone. They are food for croakers, catfish, perch, ladyfish, snook,
needlefish, bluefish, cobia, eels, flounder, trout, redfish, black drum,
tarpon, scorpionfish, batfish, mackerel, jacks, bull sharks, blacktips,
bottlenose dolphins, loggerhead turtles, pelicans, eagles, ospreys,
gulls, gannets, cormorants, loons, and skimmers. The Gulf Menhaden
are commonly called pogies.
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