The Bunker

     While reading through my blog feed, i saw something that particularly stood out to me and that look very interesting. A post about a native species in the ocean, that supports 90% of ocean life. Atlantic Menhaden or Bunker are one of the biggest and most abundant prey in the ocean to a variety of predators.

     Originally called Menhaden by the Native Americans, these fish have always been a very precious need of the ocean. Striped bass, Bluefish, Whales, Dolphins, Sharks, and birds like Osprey and Terns depend on menhaden as a food source to keep them alive. Through the food change cycle, "Bunker's" are actually primary consumers mostly because they ate plankton off of the Ocean surface. Being secondary consumers and predators, the things that eat the Bunker are getting very high energy. The Bunker travel in schools, and jump out of the water when threatened. Very agile and quick the Bunkers can evade most attacks when they are individual, but when in schools they are easily blinded by the others and get ate. But like most animals, when the Bunker are in big schools they try to scar off their predators by appearing as a bigger animal or object. The Menhaden are also have very important roles in other things to, their skin is to oily for humans to eat but it just perfect for about everything else. We have used Bunker oil in numerous things, first starting with the Native Americans federalizing their crops with it, to now where we out it in our hair products.

     The fish we call the Menhaden, Mossbunker, Bunker is a very important animal to all marine and human life, but like everything, only one life can have it. Bunker are being over caught and harvested in the Ocean which has lead to their deaths and extreme population decrease. The people catching them don't think about much but the money that they will be making, but little do they know, the Bunker are more important than anything in the Ocean. Scientist have recently been researching the topic, and have found that populations of big fish have gone down from the absence of the Bunker. They said most importantly that through a couple big Conservationist and people that are willing to help, we could possibility save the fish and get their populations.