The food cycle in the ocean

A shortage of big sharks along the U.S. East Coast is letting their prey flourish, and that prey is going hog wild, demolishing bay scallop populations.

That's the conclusion of researchers led by the late Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who died this week. Combining census surveys from the past 35 years, Myers' team found shrinking populations of big sharks and shellfish and increasing numbers of smaller sharks and rays.

"Affecting something at the top [of the food web] is going to have huge consequences as effects ramify through the system," says study collaborator Charles H. Peterson of the University of North Carolina's Institute of Marine Sciences at Morehead City. As part of the new study, he and his colleagues explored some of those effects by protecting bay scallops from the cownose ray (Rhinoptera bonasus), one of the flourishing midlevel predators.

So, the cownose rays have multiplied and are eating more of the delicacies of scallops. What to do? Should we hunt down the rays now or, as the article later suggests make the rays a delicacy themselves?

Cownose rays have grown so abundant along the U.S. East Coast that fisheries managers are trying to promote them as a seafood delicacy. TV cooking-show host Emeril Lagasse has even developed some recipes. (Picture caption)

I have never eaten a ray and have no desire to ever do so. But if people like them, why not hunt them and eat them? They are part of the food chain, as are we, and we should look at them as food just like we do for a cucumber.

Bon apetit!