Saving Seafood

PFMC Reminder: Notice of public meeting (online)

November 29, 2021 — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:

Central Subpopulation of Northern Anchovy Stock Assessment Review Panel to be held online December 7-10, 2021

The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s (Pacific Council) will convene a Stock Assessment Review (STAR) Panel meeting to review the 2021 central subpopulation of northern anchovy (CSNA) stock assessment. The online meeting will be held Tuesday, December 7 through Friday, December 10, 2021, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Pacific Standard Time, or until business for the day has been completed each day, and will be co-hosted by the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

Please see the STAR Panel December 7-10, 2021 meeting notice on the Council’s website for full details, including online participation instructions.

For further information:

•Please contact Pacific Fishery Management Council staff officer Kerry Griffin at 503-820-2409; toll-free 1-866-806-7204.

PFMC
11/17/2021

After ruling in anchovy case, future stock assessment method under debate

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and claimed the government relied on a 25-year-old model that set the annual quota at 25,000 metric tons had become outdated.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Are big ups and downs normal for forage fish?

February 16, 2017 — Forage fish stocks have undergone fluctuation swings for hundreds of years, research shows, with at least three species off the US West Coast repeatedly experiencing steep population increases followed by declines long before commercial fishing began.

The rise and fall of Pacific sardine, northern anchovy, and Pacific hake off California have been so common that the species were in collapsed condition 29 to 40 percent of the time over the 500-year period from CE 1000 to 1500, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.

Using a long time series of fish scales deposited in low-oxygen, offshore sedimentary environments off Southern California, researchers described such collapses as “an intrinsic property of some forage fish populations that should be expected, just as droughts are expected in an arid climate.”

Even though they are expected, the findings still have implications for the ecosystem, and for fishermen and fishery managers, who have witnessed several booms, followed by crashes every one to two decades on average and lasting a decade or more.

Read the full story at Futurity.com