Saving Seafood

Sentient Media Article Omits Major Scientific Debate Over Forage Fish

July 15, 2026 — An article published today by Gaea Cabico in Sentient Media criticizes the use of fishmeal in livestock feeds, including feeds used in raising pigs and chickens, and argues that converting wild-caught fish into animal feed can come at the expense of marine ecosystems.

That is a legitimate subject for examination. But the article’s treatment of forage fish science is incomplete.

To support its argument, the article relies heavily on the 2012 report Little Fish, Big Impact, produced by the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force and chaired by Ellen Pikitch. It cites the task force’s findings concerning the importance of forage fish to marine predators and repeats its recommendation that forage fish catch rates generally be limited to half the rate associated with maximum sustainable yield.

What the article does not tell readers is that the Lenfest report’s analysis and broad management recommendations later became the subject of a significant peer-reviewed scientific debate.

Prominent Scientists Challenged the Lenfest Conclusions

In 2017, fisheries scientists Ray Hilborn, Ricardo O. Amoroso, Eugenia Bogazzi, Olaf P. Jensen, Ana M. Parma, Cody Szuwalski, and Carl J. Walters published When Does Fishing Forage Species Affect Their Predators? in the journal Fisheries Research.

Their analysis directly questioned whether the Lenfest task force’s generalized conclusions could reliably be applied across different forage species, predator populations, and marine ecosystems.

Among other concerns, Hilborn and his coauthors argued that the Lenfest analysis did not adequately account for:

  • The extreme natural variability of forage fish populations, even in the absence of fishing;
  • The geographic distribution of forage fish and the spatial overlap among predators, prey, and fishing activity;
  • Differences between the sizes of forage fish consumed by predators and those harvested by fisheries;
  • Predators’ ability to switch among prey species; and
  • The distinction between a predator consuming a forage species and the predator population actually being controlled by the abundance of that species.

The authors reported that there was limited evidence of a consistently strong relationship between aggregate forage fish abundance and changes in predator abundance. They concluded that the effects of forage fishing should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and that broad reductions in harvest rates are not necessarily appropriate for every fishery or ecosystem.

The Lenfest Authors Responded — and the Debate Continued

The Lenfest task force authors responded in the same journal, defending the strength of the connection between forage fish and their predators. Hilborn and his coauthors then published a further rebuttal.

That exchange is important because it shows that the Lenfest report was not the final word on the issue and that its conclusions were not universally accepted.

The scientists on both sides generally agreed that ecosystem effects should be considered in fisheries management. But they disagreed substantially over:

  • The strength and consistency of predator-prey relationships;
  • The adequacy of the models and assumptions used in the Lenfest analysis;
  • The extent to which fishing affects predator populations; and
  • Whether broad precautionary harvest rules should be applied across very different fisheries.

A responsible account of the science should acknowledge that disagreement.

The Article Presents One Side as Settled Science

The Sentient Media article quotes Pikitch, summarizes the Lenfest task force’s findings, and presents its recommended catch-rate reduction without identifying the scientists or research that challenged those conclusions.

That omission creates the impression that the Lenfest recommendations reflect an uncontested scientific consensus. They do not.

This matters because the article makes broad claims about reduction fisheries and the use of fishmeal in livestock production around the world. Forage species, ecosystems, predator dependencies, fishing methods, end uses, and management systems vary considerably.

A small pelagic fishery in one region cannot automatically be assumed to have the same ecological effects as a fishery targeting a different species in another ecosystem. Nor can all species commonly grouped under the label “forage fish” be treated as ecologically interchangeable.

The later peer-reviewed research cautions against exactly that kind of broad generalization.

Fishmeal Policy Should Be Based on Fishery-Specific Evidence

There are valid questions to ask about the sourcing and use of fishmeal, including whether particular fisheries are sustainably managed, whether stocks are healthy, whether ecosystem needs are incorporated into management, and whether fish are being used efficiently.

But those questions should be answered using fishery-specific evidence, not by treating a disputed 2012 report as though it settled the science for every forage fishery in the world.

A meaningful evaluation should examine, at minimum:

  • The status of the individual stock;
  • The fishery’s harvest controls;
  • The natural variability of the population;
  • The species’ role in the local food web;
  • The availability of alternative prey;
  • The spatial relationship between fishing activity and predators; and
  • The actual end uses of the harvested fish.

Some fisheries may warrant greater precaution. Others may already be conservatively managed and operating within ecosystem-based frameworks. Those distinctions are essential.

Readers Deserve the Full Scientific Record

Acknowledging the criticism of the Lenfest report would not require Sentient Media to adopt Hilborn and his coauthors’ conclusions.

It would simply require the publication to tell readers that a major scientific disagreement exists.

A balanced treatment would note that, in 2017, a group of prominent fisheries scientists challenged the generality of the Lenfest task force’s findings. It would also explain that the Lenfest authors disputed that criticism and that the two groups continued the debate in the peer-reviewed literature.

That context is particularly important when an article uses the Lenfest report to support broad policy claims about fishmeal, livestock production, and marine ecosystems.

Readers should be given the complete scientific picture, not one side of a contested debate presented as settled fact.

Relevant Research

Hilborn, Ray, Ricardo O. Amoroso, Eugenia Bogazzi, Olaf P. Jensen, Ana M. Parma, Cody Szuwalski, and Carl J. Walters. “When Does Fishing Forage Species Affect Their Predators?” Fisheries Research 191 (2017): 211–221.

Pikitch, Ellen K., and other members of the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force. “The Strong Connection Between Forage Fish and Their Predators: A Response to Hilborn et al. (2017).” Fisheries Research.

Ray Hilborn and coauthors. “Response to Pikitch et al.” Fisheries Research 198 (2018): 224.

Pikitch, Ellen K., P. Dee Boersma, Ian L. Boyd, David O. Conover, Philippe Cury, Timothy E. Essington, Selina S. Heppell, Edward D. Houde, Marc Mangel, Daniel Pauly, Éva Plagányi, Keith Sainsbury, and Robert S. Steneck. Little Fish, Big Impact: Managing a Crucial Link in Ocean Food Webs. Washington, D.C.: Lenfest Ocean Program, 2012.

Hilborn: respect indigenous, western fisheries knowledge

June 19, 2026 — A prominent University of Washington professor of marine biologist and fisheries scientist says respect for every form of knowledge is needed to find solutions to the decline of Pacific salmon.

“The impact of the decline of Chinook salmon and chum salmon to western Alaska communities is a concern to all, and every form of knowledge needs to be brought to bear to understand what has caused it and help to find solutions,” wrote Ray Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery scientist at the University of Washington, in an article published in May by the Oxford University Press.

Hilborn noted that research published previously by Antoinette Lavoie, of the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University and others made a good case that Native people have been largely excluded from decision making in management of federal fisheries, especially as those fisheries may impact subsistence users.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

The missing secret behind West Coast groundfish recovery

May 11, 2026 — For years, rebuilding of West Coast groundfish stocks has been held up as one of the great success stories in American fisheries management. NOAA once called it the “comeback of the century,” celebrating the rebound of stocks that had been declared overfished in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But according to an analysis from University of Washington researchers, there’s another side to that story, one that the industry has long felt firsthand.

“Stocks were rebuilt, but at a great cost to the industry and U.S. food production,” Ray Hilborn, professor at the University of Washington, wrote in an email to National Fisherman.

Hilborn pointed to research he co-authored examining whether West Coast groundfish stocks could have rebuilt under less restrictive management measures, and whether fishermen, processors, and coastal communities paid a steeper economic price than necessary during the recovery process.

“What NOAA doesn’t advertise is that if no rebuilding plans had been implemented, $886 million in additional revenue would have been made by the fishing fleets, and the stocks would have rebuilt, but more slowly,” Hilborn wrote.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Scientists Deliberate Impacts of Monument Pelagic Fishing Prohibitions

December 9, 2025 — The following was released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council:

On the first day of its 158th meeting, the Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council reviewed the best available science on the potential benefits and costs of restoring commercial fishing in U.S. Pacific marine national monuments.

A presentation by SSC member Ray Hilborn, University of Washington professor, examined the limited data available from within existing monument closures, new information from recent re-openings and economic performance of U.S. longline vessels before and after closures. The analysis compared widely promoted claims that large marine protected areas (MPAs) increase biodiversity, create healthier ecosystems and support sustainable fisheries with empirical evidence from the Pacific.

The presentation highlighted that:

  • There is very little direct fishery or ecosystem data from inside the closed areas, with most insights coming from catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) near monument boundaries, acoustic data from drifting fish aggregating devices and economic studies.
  • For the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, modeled increases in tuna abundance through spillover were modest (on the order of a few percent), and may not translate into large fishery gains.
  • In U.S. monument waters, where historical fishing pressure was relatively low, large ecological responses to closure are not expected, and recent studies have found no measurable increase in tuna biomass density inside open-ocean MPAs and, in some cases, substantial reductions in bigeye CPUE linked to the loss of historically productive grounds.
  • Closures of marine national monuments create an illusion of “protection” while leaving non-fishing threats ignored.

Hilborn’s talk also outlined potential SSC platforms for discussion, including that well-regulated U.S. fisheries under the Magnuson–Stevens Act (MSA) are unlikely to pose an abatable threat to pelagic stocks that can be solved through large open-ocean MPAs alone, and that management frameworks such as the MSA and the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission already provide tools to achieve conservation goals while considering human and community impacts.

Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawaii Longline Association, provided public comment following the SSC discussion. He noted that existing monument area closures “exclude U.S. vessels from U.S. waters and leave us very constrained in where we can fish.” Citing declining bigeye catch rates, Kingma emphasized that “we need to be able to find and follow the fish – that’s the most important part.”

“We’re not looking for more fish, but to have the opportunity to fish more efficiently away from competitors,” Kingma said.

New review shows bottom trawling is sustainable (when well-managed)

July 20, 2023 — The following is an excerpt from an article published by Sustainable Fisheries UW:

Seafood produced by bottom trawling can have a lower environmental impact than chicken or pork, according to a new review paper published yesterday. Writing in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, Hilborn et al. 2023 argues that banning bottom trawling would increase negative environmental impacts by increasing terrestrial protein production.

Hilborn et al. 2023, reviewed dozens of papers about bottom trawling impact, including stock sustainability, bycatch, ecosystem impact, and carbon footprint. Though bottom trawling is generally the most impactful kind of fishing, well-managed bottom trawl fisheries produce food with a much lower environmental impact than any terrestrial animal protein.

A review paper summarizes the current knowledge on a particular topic by combing through and presenting conclusions from recent publications. In this case, Hilborn et al. 2023 reviewed the existing literature on the environmental impacts of bottom trawling and summarized four major impacts: Sustainability of target species, impact on benthic ecosystems, bycatch and discard, carbon emissions.

The key to reducing impacts and sustaining fisheries is management. Bottom trawling can be a low-impact form of food production in places with effective management. Bottom trawling can be highly destructive in areas with little capacity for environmental management (like many developing nations in Asia).

In this post, we summarize the findings from the four major impacts, discuss what effective bottom trawling management looks like, and compare the environmental impact of bottom trawling to other forms of food production.

Read the full article at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Critique of No-Take MPA Study Published by Nature

July 8, 2022 — Last year, Sala et al. 2021 made waves in both the scientific community and mainstream press with its publication in Nature. The paper claimed that increasing MPAs to stop fishing would lead to more seafood harvest, more biodiversity, and a reduced carbon footprint—a true win-win-win for the ocean. The press release that accompanied the paper highlighted an eye-popping statistic that bottom trawling released more carbon than all airline travel; stories covering Sala et al. 2021 appeared in hundreds of press outlets worldwide.

However, the three computer models used to make each of the “win-win-win” claims have been under increased scrutiny and many scientists doubt their conclusions.

It started with the food provisioning model initially published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2020. Inexplicable assumptions in the model and several data errors were missed by an inadequate peer review—likely due to a conflict of interest by the PNAS editor. The journal retracted it in October 2021.

You can read the whole breakdown of the retraction and the science of the food model here.

Retractions are rare in science and generally only used in cases of misconduct. Poor science is hardly ever retracted for its flaws—instead, it gets officially criticized and/or updated in the literature.

That process has now started for Sala et al. 2021, with the first official critique (and response) published today in Nature (though several critiques have been available on preprint servers).

The comment, by Ray Hilborn (founder of this site) and Michel Kaiser, points out inconsistent parameters and assumptions and criticizes the overall approach to global MPA science and advocacy.

According to Hilborn and Kaiser, the most severe flaw in Sala et al. 2021 is the inconsistent accounting of fishing effort in the author’s MPA scenarios.

In the carbon and biodiversity model, Sala et al. assumes that when an area is placed into an MPA, the fishing effort that was previously there disappears. But, in the food provisioning model, the paper assumes fishing effort moves to other areas open to fishing. This upwardly biases their claims that MPAs could simultaneously reduce carbon footprint, improve biodiversity, and increase catch:

In their calculations of biodiversity conserved and CO2 emissions reduced, the authors assume that fishing effort disappears, which would decrease total harvest at the point when the MPAs are established. Yet in the base case for the fisheries harvest section, the authors assume that fishing effort moves to areas open to fishing, keeping fishing harvests high.

MPAs certainly reduce fishing effort inside a protected area, but in the real world, fishing effort does not simply disappear—it moves outside the MPA to places where fishing is still allowed. In this scenario, the benefits to carbon emissions and biodiversity presented in Sala et al. would significantly decrease, perhaps even show a net negative response because:

Fishing effort generally goes to places with high catch rates, and if forced to fish elsewhere, more effort is required to achieve the same catch.

In their response to Hilborn and Kaiser, the original authors acknowledge that the attention-grabbing statistic in the press release that bottom trawling releases more carbon into the ocean than all airline emissions would only be true if fishing effort disappears.

Though it garnered big headlines and more attention than any other ocean science paper of the last few years, Sala et al. 2021 does a disservice to marine conservation with its analysis based on incomplete data and erroneous assumptions. Policy that follows its recommendations would potentially waste conservation effort and money on strategies that would not deliver on goals, e.g., proposing a network of MPAs where fisheries are already well managed.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Shifting ocean closures best way to protect animals from accidental catch

January 18, 2022 — Accidentally trapping sharks, seabirds, marine mammals, sea turtles and other animals in fishing gear is one of the biggest barriers to making fisheries more sustainable around the world. Marine protected areas — sections of the ocean set aside to conserve biodiversity — are used, in part, to reduce the unintentional catch of such animals, among other conservation goals.

Many nations are calling for protection of 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 from some or all types of exploitation, including fishing. Building off this proposal, a new analysis led by the University of Washington looks at how effective fishing closures are at reducing accidental catch. Researchers found that permanent marine protected areas are a relatively inefficient way to protect marine biodiversity that is accidentally caught in fisheries. Dynamic ocean management — changing the pattern of closures as accidental catch hotspots shift — is much more effective. The results were published Jan. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We hope this study will add to the growing movement away from permanently closed areas to encourage more dynamic ocean management,” said senior author Ray Hilborn, a professor at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “Also, by showing the relative ineffectiveness of static areas, we hope it will make conservation advocates aware that permanent closed areas are much less effective in reducing accidental catch than changes in fishing methods.”

Read the full story at UW News

URI professor part of a worldwide study on impacts of bottom trawling on health of seabeds

January 10, 2021 — A worldwide study on the impacts of bottom trawling, which accounts for a quarter of the world’s seafood harvest and can negatively affect marine ecosystems, has found that seabeds are in good health where trawl fisheries are sustainably managed.

The research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) by a team including co-author Jeremy Collie, Professor of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, builds on recent international collaboration in this field and is the first worldwide study of its kind. It brings together data from 24 large marine regions around the world to establish a relationship between distribution and intensity of trawling activities and the biological state of seabeds.

Read the full story at The University of Rhode Island

 

Study finds existing forage fish management is working

July 9, 2021 — Efforts to ratchet down fishing effort on species like herring and menhaden in the name of “extra precautionary management” in most cases are unlikely to bring additional benefits for stocks of predator species that eat them, according to a new study.

“Our results indicate that predator productivity was rarely influenced by the abundance of their forage fish prey,” wrote authors Christopher Free of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Olaf Jensen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington. “Only 6 predator populations (13 percent of the total) were positively influenced by increasing prey abundance and the model exhibited high power to detect prey influences when they existed,” according to their paper titled “Evaluating impacts of forage fish abundance on marine predators,” originally published in the journal Conservation Biology.

“These results suggest that additional limitation of forage fish harvest to levels well below sustainable yields would rarely result in detectable increases in marine predator populations.”

The findings were released July 6 through the Science Center for Marine Fisheries, a cooperative effort to improve sustainability of fisheries and reduce uncertainty in biomass estimates with work by university partners led with the University of Southern Mississippi Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, as academic sites.

“Our work suggests that the sustainable limits that we already employ are sufficient for maintaining forage fish abundance above the thresholds that are necessary for their predators,” Free of UC Santa Barbara in a statement describing the findings. “Predators are highly mobile, they have high diet flexibility, and they can go and look for forage fish in places where they’re doing well, switch species for species that are doing well, and have often evolved to breed in places where there’s high and stable forage fish abundance.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

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