Anchovies Archives - Saving Seafood

Del Mar Seafoods expanding operations with new facility

July 15, 2025 — Watsonville, California, U.S.A.-based Del Mar Seafoods has expanded its operations with the lease of a new facility.

Founded in 1988, Del Mar Seafoods is a vertically integrated seafood producer and processor in California that produces and supplies over 30 million pounds of squid, anchovies, and other wild-caught species per year. The company was a part of collaboration to obtain Marine Stewardship Council certification for the California squid fishery, which was ultimately granted in 2023.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Vitamin deficiency is killing salmon in California

July 1, 2025 –A vitamin deficiency linked to an enzyme found in anchovies that breaks down Vitamin B1, or thiamine, is threatening the survival of Chinook salmon in California and far beyond.

“An interesting piece of the puzzle is that we don’t have evidence for diminished sources of thiamine in the ocean food web,” said Nathan Mantua, a research scientist with NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, Calif. “Instead, we have evidence that anchovy carry an enzyme called thiaminase that destroys thiamine in the predator’s stomach when the anchovy is digested.”

Mantua is part of the team of 37 coauthors of a new research paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that links Vitamin B1 deficiency to the anchovy-dominated diet that likely resulted in the death of nearly half of California’s wild winter-run Central Valley Chinook salmon fry in 2020-2021.

“It has been a fascinating five years of research working with an entirely new group of people for me in our ongoing investigations into thiamine deficiency in California’s salmon,” said Mantua.

The issue came to their attention just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in January of 2020, so they had to develop a research program at a time when there were lots of big changes happening to the way they worked in the office, on the ocean, and in rivers. In spite of all those hurdles, the group came together to rapidly develop a research network that worked together really well, he said.

A research summary released by NOAA Fisheries on June 25 notes that thiamine deficiency is linked to large-scale shifts in the ocean ecosystem, shifts that changed the prey adult salmon consume before returning to West Coast rivers to spawn. Longtime loss of habitat and water has already weakened many California salmon populations, and further declines from thiamine deficiency or other impacts may lead to their extinction, the report said.

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

San Diego researchers seek key to understanding volatile anchovy population shifts

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.

Read the full story at KPBS

Warmer, oxygen-poor waters threaten world’s ‘most heavily exploited’ fish

January 7, 2022 — In 2008, a team of researchers boarded an expedition vessel and set sail for the anchovy-rich waters off the coast of Peru. They were searching for a place to extract a sediment sample that would unearth secrets about the ocean from 130,000 years ago, a time when the planet was experiencing its last interglacial period. About 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Lima, the researchers found an ideal spot; they bore into the seabed and drew out a 20-meter (66-foot) core sample.

Over the next 13 years, researcher Renato Salvatteci and a team of colleagues worked to date the core and measure fish debris. They were trying to figure out what fish were living along the Humboldt Current system off the coast of Peru during that interglacial period, when the ocean contained little oxygen and was about 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) warmer than the average temperature experienced in the current Holocene epoch — conditions that almost match what scientists project for 2100 as climate change rapidly transforms our modern world.

Today, the Humboldt Current contributes to more than 15% of the global annual fish catch, mainly due to its abundance of Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens), a species in the anchovy family. It’s also what global conservation authority the IUCN calls “the most heavily exploited single-species fishery in world history.”

Every centimeter of the sediment held an astonishing amount of information — about 90 years’ worth, said Salvatteci, a fisheries engineer at Kiel University in Germany. What they found embedded in the ancient sediment wasn’t anchoveta, but the vertebrae of “considerably smaller” fish, such as mesopelagic and goby-like fish, that were able to cope with the low oxygen levels in the water. They published their findings in Science on Jan. 6.

Read the full story at Mongabay

California Current Fish Surveys Resume with 3-Month Assessment of Sardine, Anchovy, and Mackerel

July 30, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries has begun an ambitious assessment of small pelagic fish reaching from the Canadian border to the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula, in cooperation with Mexico, which will help determine how many fish can be caught off the West Coast.

The COVID-19 pandemic had idled surveys for sardine, anchovy, and other species of small coastal pelagic species (CPS) off the West Coast since 2019. Small pelagic species are important ecologically and provide food for larger fish, such as tunas. The new assessment resumes regular CPS surveys by collecting data from NOAA Ship Reuben Lasker, commercial fishing vessels equipped with acoustic technology, and autonomous Saildrones.

The Lasker left San Diego on July 6, becoming the centerpiece of the 3-month survey. It will cover thousands of miles in U.S., and Mexican waters. NOAA Fisheries scientists are coordinating efforts with federal fisheries agencies in Mexico and Canada, providing a science foundation for future decisions on fishing levels and seasons.

“Organizing and coordinating this survey was a tremendous feat of collaboration,” said Kristen Koch, Director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, which is leading the survey. “Collecting data across all three countries will provide a valuable foundation for management of these important transboundary species.”

The Lasker will survey coastal pelagic fish along transects in the California Current, quantifying the fish with echosounders. These instruments include an advanced new model that can for the first time also measure the velocities of fish as they swim relative to the ship. The measurements will help to understand whether and how fish respond to survey vessels and if those reactions affect the quality of data on the numbers and distributions of fish.

Read the full release here

California Current Fish Surveys Resume with 3-Month Assessment of Sardine, Anchovy, and Mackerel

July 22, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Read the full release here

Impacts of fishing forage fish on the fish that feed on forage fish

June 7, 2021 — Small pelagic fish that school in open water—think sardines or anchovies, are eaten by all kinds of predators. Seabirds, marine mammals, and bigger fish feed on these small pelagics giving them the moniker “forage fish.”

Forage fish support several fisheries, particularly “reduction fisheries,” where fish are caught and reduced into fishmeal and fish oil for livestock and aquaculture. The anchoveta fishery off the coast of South America is the largest in the world, and nearly all catch is reduced. From a food production perspective, reduction fisheries turn fish that humans don’t like to eat into other kinds of meat that humans do. That isn’t to say forage fish aren’t fished for human consumption—they are and have one of the lowest carbon footprints of any food, but the majority of catch is reduced. Eat more anchovies and sardines, people!

However, forage fish also play a foundational role in many ocean ecosystems. They buoy the diets of marine birds and mammals like whales, puffins, albatross, and other vulnerable species while also indirectly supporting valuable fisheries, e.g., salmon and tuna feed on forage fish. Their role in the food chain has led to some calls to limit forage fish fisheries to boost the populations of their higher-value predators. This makes intuitive sense, but new research out this week by Free et al. shows it’s more complicated than simply “more prey, more predators.”

In 2012, a prominent forage fish paper was published that advised a highly precautionary approach to commercial fishing of forage fish. They suggested that to be as conservative as possible, even fisheries currently considered well-managed should be reduced by 50% to enhance and maintain predator populations. It kicked off a decade of forage fish population modeling and scientific discussion. The major criticism of the 2012 paper was that the ecosystem model used in the paper assumed that commercial fishing had an outsized impact on forage fish populations and did not account for ocean conditions. However, forage fish populations are highly sensitive to environmental conditions. For example, long before humans were fishing them, the Pacific Sardine went through periods of significant population boom and bust. This environmental sensitivity complicates the understanding of fishing impact, especially because the predators eat far more forage fish than are taken via fishing. Surly overfishing is bad, but would further reducing fishing below sustainable levels benefit the broader ecosystem?

Scientists did more research. In 2017, a paper by Hilborn et al. showed little correlation between forage fish populations and their predators. The authors argued that if forage fish have natural boom and bust cycles, their predators should have the resilience to find other kinds of prey in times of bust (and indeed, most marine predators that forage on small pelagic fish have a broad diet and are highly mobile). Hilborn et al. challenged the 2012 paper’s recommendations for a highly precautionary approach to forage fish fisheries. However, it was still a relatively simple analysis—the authors used population data to show correlations (or the lack thereof) between the abundance of forage fish and changes in their predator populations. They found that just 5 of the 50 predators examined in that study showed a positive correlation to forage fish population.

The 2017 paper showed correlation but not causality—the paper published this week gets closer to causality by controlling for possible confounding factors, namely by using a predator dynamics model that accounted for forage fish boom and bust cycles. This hadn’t been in previous models. Further, the 2017 paper only looked at U.S. ecosystems; this paper included ecosystems in Europe, South Africa, and the Humboldt Current off South America, giving a more global view of forage fish ecosystem dynamics.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Oceana, Earthjustice File Suit Again Over NMFS Anchovy Rules on West Coast

February 4, 2021 — Call it a vicious circle. Maybe a vortex from which it seems there is no escape. Maybe it’s quicksand.

Regardless, Earthjustice and Oceana are, for the third time, suing NMFS over the central subpopulation of northern anchovy on the West Coast. NMFS published new anchovy catch limit regulations on Dec. 31, 2020; the conservation groups said those regulations, again, were insufficient.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Oceana takes government to court again over anchovy limits

February 2, 2021 — Oceana continues to challenge the U.S. government over federal catch limits on anchovy the organization claims ignore scientific advice.

In a statement on Monday, 1 February, the environmental conservation group announced it has filed two legal actions to support what it calls “science-based management” of the northern anchovy stock. The organization has taken NOAA Fisheries to court over anchovy catch limits multiple times over the past few years, and alleged in 2019 that it had failed to protect the anchovy stock in Northern California.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Court Rules NMFS Needs to Better Manage Anchovies, CA Wetfish Assoc. Pushes Back

September 9, 2020 — For the second time in two years, a federal court has ruled that National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) violated the nation’s fishery management law — the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act or MSA — by not using the ‘best available science’ in setting static catch limits on a widely fluctuating anchovy biomass. But an important industry group of harvesters and processors who are also involved in scientific research projects, take issue with the decision.

“Long story short, the judge ruled on a ‘what if’ worst case scenario, not on the reality of anchovy abundance now, or our little anchovy fishery, which food habits studies have shown take less than 1 percent of the anchovy consumed by predators,” said Diane Pleshner-Steele, the executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association. The CWPA is also an intervenor-defendant in the suit.

Read the full story at Seafood News