Herrings and sardines
Hilsa, oil sardine, herring, shad and anchovies. 3 fish on EveryFish so far.
Herrings, sardines, shads and anchovies, the order Clupeiformes, are small to medium silvery fish that travel in huge schools and filter plankton from the water. There are around 400 species. They are among the most caught fish on Earth and feed seabirds, seals, whales, tuna and people. Many have a sharp keel of scales along the belly, which gives some of them their name of sawbelly.
Feeding the world
The Peruvian anchoveta is, in most years, the largest single-species fishery on Earth, most of it turned into fish meal and oil. Atlantic herring built the wealth of the Hanseatic towns and the Dutch herring fleets. The oil sardine of India's west coast is the most landed fish in Kerala in most years, eaten fried and curried, and its catch swings widely with ocean conditions, from a peak of nearly 400,000 tonnes in Kerala in 2012 to a small fraction of that a few years later.
The hilsa
The hilsa is a shad that lives in the Bay of Bengal and swims up the Padma, Meghna, Hooghly and Godavari to spawn in the monsoon. It is Bangladesh's national fish, and its oily, bony flesh is central to Bengali food and festivals. Bangladesh lands most of the world's catch. Dams, barrages and the catching of young hilsa, called jatka, reduced the runs, and fishing bans and river sanctuaries are used to protect them.
Still to be written: Ilish, Indian oil sardine, Atlantic herring, Peruvian anchoveta, European pilchard, American shad, Indian anchovy, Sardinops.
Further reading
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- American gizzard shad: Unknown author, Public domain, source