February 8, 2019 — The federal government has about 10 weeks before it must establish a new catch limit for an anchovy fishery in northern California, and as time winds down, discussions about the fishery’s future are ramping up.
However, the talk regarding the future of the northern anchovy’s central sub-population isn’t just about a new limit.
“It’s time to bring anchovy management into the 21st century by updating catch limits each year to reflect real-time abundance data rather than a decades-old guesstimate,” Andrea Treece, a lawyer for Earthjustice, said in a release announcing U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh’s decision. Treece represented Oceana, which filed a lawsuit in November 2016 and claimed the government relied on a 25-year-old model that set the annual quota at 25,000 metric tons had become outdated.