Saving Seafood

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

July 22, 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

Oceana sues NMFS over California sardine management

July 20, 2021 — Alleging that West Coast fisheries managers are repeating mistakes of the past half-century, the environmental group Oceana is suing NMFS over its approval of the latest sardine management plan and demanding more action to rebuild the stock.

“Despite these hard lessons, NMFS repeats these management failures in Amendment 18,” states the group’s complaint, filed by the legal group Earthjustice July 14 in the U.S. District Court for northern California, naming Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, NOAA and the fisheries agency.

Oceana says NMFS should not have approved the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s amendment to the coastal pelagic species management plan, allowing managers to “chose a suite of already disproven, status quo management measures that will keep this population at levels too low to support either the ecosystem or the primary fishery that relies on sardine for half a century or more.”

Managers recognize that the sardine stock size is primarily driven by environmental factors, and that there is inadequacy of surveys used in assessments, said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association.

“Oceana just refuses to acknowledge the reality,” said Pleschner-Steele. “We’ve been arguing for years that the surveys don’t capture the (accurate number) of fish.”

The accusation of “status quo is misrepresenting management,” said Pleschner-Steele. The council and NMFS need flexibility to improve surveys and assessments, monitor environmental factors and consider the fishing community needs with “the only reasonable rebuilding plan,” she said.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

2021-2022 Annual Specifications and Management Measures for Pacific Sardine

July 15, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries has implemented annual harvest specifications and management measures for the northern subpopulation of Pacific sardine (hereafter, Pacific sardine), for the fishing year from July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022. The rule prohibits most directed commercial fishing for Pacific sardine off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California.

Pacific sardine harvest are allowed only in the live bait fishery, minor directed fisheries, as incidental catch in other fisheries, or as authorized under exempted fishing permits. The incidental harvest of Pacific sardine is limited to 20 percent by weight of all fish per trip when caught with other stocks managed under the Coastal Pelagic Species Fishery Management Plan or up to 2 metric tons per trip when caught with non-Coastal Pelagic Species stocks. The annual catch limit for the 2021-2022 Pacific sardine fishing year is 3,329 metric tons.

This rule is intended to conserve and manage the Pacific sardine stock off the U.S. West Coast.

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

Scientists Record 4 Collapses in Sardine Population in the Gulf of California

May 10, 2021 — In the last 30 years, overfishing and alterations caused by Climate Change decimated the number of individuals and their fishing fell from 300 thousand tons per year to only 10 thousand

Sardine capture in the Gulf of California has fallen from 300,000 tons per year to just 10,000 tons per year, in four different cycles since 1991. An international scientific study published last Tuesday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences concluded that radical population declines in sardines, called collapses, are caused by the combination of overfishing and alterations caused by climate change.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Pacific Council Rejects Sardine Stock Projection; Approves Reduced Fishing Levels for 2021

April 15, 2021 — In a surprising turn, the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee rejected a Southwest Fisheries Science Center catch-only sardine biomass projection when the Council met this week.

NMFS field surveys were cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and no real directed fishery in the U.S. has been conducted on sardines since 2015. The catch-only projection was supposed to be the basis for the fishery’s management measures for the season from July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2022.

Read the full story at Seafood News

PFMC Approves Pacific Sardine Fishing Levels for 2021

April 13, 2021 — The following was released by the California Wetfish Producers Association:

Conducting its April meeting via webinar, the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) approved management measures for the ‘northern’ stock of Pacific sardines for the season July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022. The conflict over sardine fishery management became painfully apparent after the Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) rejected the catch-only sardine biomass projection, which was the only estimate available because NOAA field surveys were cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The catch for the Mex-Cal fishery (33,000 tons with only about 700 tons from California) was nearly three times larger than the sardine model’s northern sardine catch estimate for the Mex-Cal fishery in 2020. The Mexican catch was actually higher than the entire 2020 biomass estimate. This discrepancy illuminated serious problems with current assessment methods and assumptions.

The SSC recommended several urgent research priorities, including reconsideration of the model and assumptions used to assign sardines to northern vs. southern stocks. The CPS Management Team and Advisory Subpanel also supported the SSC’s recommendation to fall back to the 2020 assessment, and add another layer of precaution to account for the uncertainty, until problems can be addressed in a full stock assessment with independent scientific review. The approved management measures reduced the already low allowable catch by another 25 percent.

“We greatly appreciate the expressions of concern from the SSC, management team and advisory subpanel, and the Council’s action based on those concerns,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, Executive Director of the California Wetfish Producers Association (CWPA). “This conflict is between what fishermen say is out there, based on what they see, and what biologists say, based on insufficient science.”

Both fishermen and independent scientific surveys have documented sardine recruitment and increasing abundance. But assumptions of continued decline and low recruitment caused the directed sardine fishery to be closed in 2015, and ‘northern’ sardines to be declared ‘overfished’ in 2019, which reduced the incidental take of sardine in other fisheries to 20 percent. The Council also was required to develop a rebuilding plan.

The directed fishery has been closed for nearly 7 years, and the model used to predict biomass has not updated the age data from the fishery since 2015. Stock assessment scientists prefer only age data from ‘directed’ fishing, and have not used age data from incidental catches or the live bait fishery, which have both seen an increase in small fish in recent years. The problem is that NOAA’s sardine acoustic trawl surveys, conducted primarily offshore, have not seen it, and those surveys, coupled with assumptions made regarding ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ sardines, have largely driven stock assessments in recent years.

To resolve this Catch-22, CWPA requested and received an Exempted Fishing Permit (EFP) in 2020 and coordinated a closely-controlled directed fishing effort to capture sardine schools throughout the year. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) sampled and aged all the landings. Age data shared with the Council during the meeting showed a spike in young sardines, virtually all captured in water temperatures under about 62 degrees F, assumed to be ‘northern’ sardines.

CWPA is also conducting a nearshore acoustic survey in California this year, in cooperation with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC), and has been cooperating with CDFW since 2012 in the Department’s nearshore aerial survey. “There’s a substantial body of sardines (and anchovy) in nearshore waters inshore of NOAA surveys in California. These fish need to be included in stock assessments, and we’re cooperating with the SWFSC and Department to collect the data needed,” Pleschner-Steele commented.

Another frustrating problem that California fishermen continue to face is the current scientific assumption that all sardines above 62 degrees F are assumed to be ‘southern’ stock sardines that have migrated up from Mexico. Those fish are subtracted from the ‘northern’ sardine stock assessment. But for management, all catches are deducted from the ‘northern’ sardine harvest limit, regardless of water temperature. This is a big problem, particularly in summertime in southern California, when the live bait fishery is active. All California coastal pelagic (CPS) fisheries have been impacted by current sardine management policies that restrict the incidental catch of sardine to only 20 percent. This has sharply reduced landings for CPS finfish like anchovy and mackerel, because fishermen must try to find pure schools with no or few sardines. Even the squid fishery has had problems avoiding sardines.

“We strongly support the SSC’s urgent research priorities,” Diane Pleschner-Steele said. “We need to fix the problems with sardine assessments and management as soon as possible.” She added, “we are committed to conduct the research necessary to improve the sardine stock assessment. If the ‘northern’ sardine stock assessment accurately reflected the abundance of sardines reported by fishermen virtually yearlong (in water temperatures below 62 degrees F), northern sardines would not be considered ‘overfished.’”

California fishermen and processors are grateful that the Council considered the issues and uncertainties raised and combined scientific underpinning with practicality and common sense. Balance is a key mandate of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. The Council and NMFS are required to consider the needs of fishing communities, not just biology, in developing rebuilding plans. The future of California’s historic wetfish industry hangs in the balance.

D.B. Pleschner is executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, a nonprofit dedicated to research and to promote sustainable Wetfish resources. More info at www.californiawetfish.org

Pacific Sardine Landings May Shift North as Ocean Warms, New Projections Show

February 25, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Pacific sardines are a small but sometimes numerous fish closely intertwined with California’s fishing history. A new study linking climate change and the northern sardine stock fishery shows that they may shift north along the West Coast as the ocean warms.

A climate-driven northward shift by sardines could cause a decline in landings of the northern sardine stock by 20 to 50 percent in the next 60 years. These changes would affect historic California fishing ports such as San Pedro and Moss Landing, according to the new research published in Fisheries Oceanography. The study did not examine whether southern sardine stock would also shift northward, potentially offsetting this decline in landings. In turn, landings at northern port cities such as Astoria, Oregon, and Westport, Washington, are projected to benefit.

Researchers examined three possible “climate futures.” The warmest had the most pessimistic outcomes, with total sardine landings in all West Coast states declining 20 percent by 2080.

Understanding climate-driven shifts in habitat helps predict impacts on landings

The study translates environmental shifts into possible impacts on fishing communities and coastal economies. Sardines have historically gone through “boom and bust” changes in their population. Their numbers off the West Coast have remained low in recent years, with the West Coast sardine fishery closed since 2015. This research does not project changes in the abundance of sardines. Instead, it shows that climate-driven shifts in their habitat may have a significant impact on landings at historically important ports.

“As the marine environment changes, so too will the distribution of marine species,” said James Smith, a research scientist with the University of Santa Cruz affiliated with NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “But linking future changes in the distribution of species with impacts on the fishing fleet has been challenging. Hopefully our study can provide information about potential impacts in coming decades, and thereby inform strategies to mitigate these impacts.”

Read the full release here

CALIFORNIA: The Pacific sardine war hits a lull, but the tides are rising

November 4, 2020 — With catch limit regulations staying at the status quo, the commercial fishing industry has apparently landed a victory in the fight over Pacific sardine management.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees fishing of Pacific sardines, voted unanimously in September to maintain the current sardine fishery management process that calls for reassessments after each year’s stock assessments.

At the moment, the direct commercial sardine fishery is closed. Sardines may only be harvested in the live bait fishery, small-scale fisheries (or operations), as incidental catch, and with exempted permits approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service. These open sardine fisheries are subject to an annual catch limit of about 16% of the sardine population measured in 2019, or 4,514 metric tons.

Conservationists had hoped the council would tighten catch limits for fear of the sardine population collapsing further.

Read the full story at The Mercury News

Russia Hopes to Compensate Unsuccessful Salmon Fishing Season by Increase of Pollock Catch This Year

October 27, 2020 — Russia hopes to compensate the unsuccessful salmon fishing season this year with the increase of production of ivasi sardine, mackerel and pollock, according to recent statements made by the head of the Russian Federal Agency for Fishery (Rosrybolovstvo), Ilya Shestakov, during his recent meeting with the Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

During the meeting, which was dedicated to the situation in the domestic fishing sector, Shestakov said despite the pandemic, the current situation in the industry remains stable.  

Read the full story at Seafood News