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Forage fish

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Forage fish and the food web
Fishing down marine food webs
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Dolphins herd sardines
Gannets "divebomb" sardines
This article is
one of a series on
Commercial fish
Blue walleye.jpg
Large pelagic
billfish, bonito
mackerel, salmon
shark, tuna

Forage
anchovy, herring
menhaden, sardine
shad, sprat

Demersal
cod, eel, flatfish
pollock, ray
Mixed
carp, tilapia

Forage fish, also called prey fish or bait fish, are small pelagic fish which are preyed on by larger predators for food. Predators include other larger fish, seabirds and marine mammals. Typical ocean forage fish feed near the base of the food chain on plankton, often by filter feeding. They include particularly fishes of the family Clupeidae (herrings, sardines, shad, hilsa, menhaden, anchovies and sprats), but also other small fish, including halfbeaks, silversides, smelt such as capelin, and the goldband fusiliers pictured on the right.

Forage fish compensate for their small size by forming schools. Some swim in synchronised grids with their mouths open so they can efficiently filter plankton. These schools can become immense shoals which move along coastlines and migrate across open oceans. The shoals are concentrated fuel resources for the great marine predators. The predators are keenly focused on the shoals, acutely aware of their numbers and whereabouts, and make migrations themselves that can span thousands of miles to connect, or stay connected, with them.

The ocean primary producers, mainly contained in plankton, produce food energy from the sun and are the raw fuel for the ocean food webs. Forage fish transfer this energy by eating the plankton and becoming food themselves for the top predators. In this way, forage fish occupy the central positions in ocean and lake food webs.


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