Word: menhaden
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Agricultural and chemical interests pointed out that endrin is a notably safe and useful insecticide, and that it was hardly proper to indict the chemical on the evidence of so small a samling. Most of the dead Mississippi fish, PHS critics argued, were menhaden, an almost inedible saltwater inhabitant...
...menhaden were analyzed, and since they normally live in the sea, there was little chance that they could be affected by insecticides anyway...
...Theory. The PHS withdrew its claims about the menhaden, which left about 175,000 fresh-water fish believed to have died of endrin. But how did the poison get into the fish while the water in which they lived was essentially free of endrin? The PHS believes fish gradually concentrate the insecticide, which lodges in their fat. When the fish consume their fat in time of food scarcity, enough endrin is released into their blood to kill them...
...Bureau of Commercial Fisheries was planning a dirty scientific trick to play on schools of herring and menhaden off the Maine coast last week. At Boothbay Harbor, Me., the 139-ft. "pogy" (menhaden) boat Rappahannock is fitted with a 52-h.p. compressor that delivers 196 cu. ft. of air at the pressure of 80 lbs. per sq. in. The idea is to shoot the air through perforated tubes sunk in the water near schools of fish. Curtains of bubbles rising from the perforations look to the fish like an impassable barrier and shoo them toward the Rappahannock...
When a boil of Gulf Stream finally points to pogy, and the men in the small boats close their quarter-mile ring of net to draw it in, the menhaden suddenly "thunder" (i.e., make a quivering mass surge) and split the net. Captain Crother follows another school too close to shore, promptly loses a second net when its base is sucked fast into the sandy ocean floor. Still another catch has to be let go when baby sharks begin to shred a third net. In final irony, the Moona Waa Togue is almost within hail of home port with...