December 6, 2023 — A huge school of anchovy looked like a moving underwater shadow in images captured when the small fish gathered near San Diego’s Scripps Pier in 2014.
It was part of a boom cycle for the fish with a notoriously volatile population.
New research published in the current edition of the journal Nature Communications unlocks some of the mystery surrounding the reasons for the fluctuating population.
Anchovies are popular with humans, especially in Caesar salads, and they are an important part of the underwater food web.
The schools of fish feed marine mammals, seabirds and other larger fish. When anchovies are plentiful the marine environment thrives. During times of scarcity, hunger and starvation can hit, like the sea lion mortality event between 2013 and 2016.