The Pacific sardine fishery comes with some history (Monterey Country Weekly, January 1, 2014, emphasis added).
You won’t find them on any veterans memorials, but sardines — by the billions — died to help us fight, and win, the Second World War. In 1939 alone, 460,000 tons of sardines were caught off Monterey’s coast, most of which were shipped to the front. That’s 980 million pounds, about 3 billion sardines.
Sardines’ survival strategy is a function of those numbers — they form large schools that can swell into the millions.
Then there are the real impressive numbers: Under the right conditions, a large, mature female can produce close to a million eggs in a single seven-month spawning season. To keep up, a hen would have to lay almost 5,000 eggs per day.
“Older [females] can continually spawn month after month,” says Alec MacCall, a senior scientist at the Santa Cruz office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries Service. “They can produce thousands of eggs per week.”
In a world where sardines only had to worry about the bigger fish, these qualities served them well. Then along came humans, and nets. Schooling in massive numbers no longer helped sardines — it helped drive them close to extinction.
Monterey’s sardine fishery, at its peak in the late 1930's, employed up to 8,000 people and had two dozen canneries.
“Monterey was a small town in those days,” says Cannery Row historian Michael Hemp. “That was a lot of people for the workforce. And the rest of the economy also depended on the industry.”
Its vigor made it one of the most productive fisheries on the planet.
But it didn’t last.
“I made a graph of sardine abundance,” says NOAA’s MacCall. “I started at 3 million tons in 1930. By 1970, my pencil lead was too thick to show the [paucity] we had left. It was less than one thousandth of what we began with.”
For Monterey, the collapse was comprehensive: The town’s credit system, which was built upon the trust of sardine abundance, imploded. Along Cannery Row, buildings fell into decay, and others simply went up in flames. In the span of a decade, Monterey’s boom went bust, and the thriving burg became a ghost town.
The collapse of the Pacific sardine fishery in the 1950's was certainly exacerbated by overfishing in the two prior decades, but was probably inevitable due to a natural boom and bust cycle (and look at this overview).
It is now the year 2015 and scientists have learned a lot about natural fluctuations in sardine populations, which are primarily due to the cycling of ocean temperatures (warm/cool) caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Now, in 2015, the Pacific sardine fishery is said to be one of the best run fisheries in the world. I'll quote the Monterey Country Weekly again.
The formula that informs how many sardines can be fished is complicated.
NOAA projects the sardine population for the following year. Then, they subtract a number called the “cutoff” (currently, that number is set at 150,000 metric tons) — if population estimates are less than that number, no fishing is permitted the following year. What remains after the subtraction is then multiplied by two variables. The first is established by water temperatures — the cooler the water, the lower it gets (currently it’s 0.15) The second is determined by how much of the population is thought to be in U.S. waters (currently 87 percent, or 0.87).
The formula’s complexity reflects the fact that the U.S. sardine fishery is among the most progressive fisheries in the world, one with built-in checks and balances, plus controls that fluctuate with the environment.
“We have a lower fishing rate, a guaranteed [fishing] cutoff based on abundance, a whole bunch of things that have never been done before on a fishery,” MacCall says. “And it’s maybe the only fishery in the world with a temperature control.”
Yet that formula, with its multiple, unprecedented controls, is still seen by some as misguided...
Oceana, among others, sees that formula as misguided, but what did we learn in yesterday's post?
We learned that, despite an obvious collapse in Pacific sardine populations after 2007, commercial fishermen were still taking sardines in California coastal waters as late as March of this year. This was happening in one of the "most progressive fisheries in the world," perhaps the only "fishery in the world with a [water] temperature control."
In practical terms, what have humans learned about managing the Pacific sardine fishery since the 1950's? Not much. So much for Progress.
I discussed this characteristic human behavior in Adventures In Flatland — Part II, from which I will now quote.
Humans are generally oblivious to their primitive self-centerness—there is no authoritative "outside" party (God? Neanderthals? Aliens?) to tell them they are not the be all or end all of everything...
They are equally oblivious to the crucial central fact that economic concerns always trump environmental concerns unless the cost of attending to the environment is tolerably low. This observation applies everywhere, for example, to mitigating global warming or historical interactions between humans and other species...
In this case, the other species in question is Sardinops sagax caerulea (the Pacific sardine). In 2015, despite a wealth of knowledge about natural population fluctuations, these sardines were harvested until the economic cost of shutting down the fishery was nearly zero.
Even then, National Public Radio (which I quoted yesterday) made sure to include the following text in their report on the fishery closure.
The [Pacific Fishery Management Council] recognized the decision could pose financial problems for some fishermen, although most also harvest mackerel, anchovies and squid, according to Reuters. About 100 boats have permits to fish for sardines on the west coast.
In short, jeopardizing the long-term health of an ecologically crucial fish population had to be weighed and balanced against the short-term economic interests of "some fishermen" (about 100 boats). This text is from the environment 360 article I quoted yesterday.
The impacts of the current Pacific sardine collapse are rippling through the marine ecosystem. Sardines, anchovies, herring, and other forage fish are enormously important to ocean ecosystems, playing a key role in moving food at the bottom of the food web to the top. Along the Pacific Coast, where they ply the waters of the California Current, from southern British Columbia to Baja California, sardines and anchovies are essential prey for salmon, tuna, whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and other species.
Sardines, which are exceptionally nutritious because of their high oil content, are vital to mother sea lions feeding their pups and to nesting brown pelicans. More than 70 percent of all sea lion pups born this year may perish because of a lack of sardines, NOAA scientists say. Starving pups have been seen on California’s Channel Islands, says Ben Enticknap, senior scientist and Pacific campaign manager with Oceana, a marine conservation organization.
In addition, California brown pelicans have been experiencing high rates of nesting failure and thousands have been dying. “Brown pelican have been abandoning their nests because they can’t get enough food to feed their chicks,” says Enticknap.
In the end, the environmental problems discussed above counted for nothing. It was only after sardines had become scarce in California coastal waters that the fishery was closed. The short-term economic interests of a relatively few humans were served until those interests no longer existed.
I discussed all this in Flatland Part II in more general terms, saying that "human self-centeredness revolving around growth and self-interest is primarily expressed within an economic frame of reference." The scope of that frame of reference becomes clear when we look at global pressure on forage fish populations (sardines are forage fish).
The Pacific sardine crash comes at a time of intense global fishing pressure on forage fish. Some are eaten fresh or canned. But huge quantities go into fishmeal for livestock and aquaculture feed. While fishmeal was once used primarily for livestock and poultry feed, it is now used mainly for aquaculture production, which has soared more than 10-fold in recent decades, from 8 million tons in 1980 to 107 million tons in 2013, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. According to one study, 87 percent of the world’s forage fish — an estimated 26 million tons — are now used as food in aquaculture operations. Many scientists say this forage fish harvest is unsustainable.
Aquaculture companies say they have been making steady progress in recent years in reducing the amount of forage fish needed to produce a pound of, say, farmed salmon. Once, up to five pounds of wild fish were needed to produce a pound of salmon, but the use of vegetable proteins, algae, and other nutrients have steadily reduced that ratio in recent years.
Thus we see that the Pacific sardine fiasco is simply one example of a global phenomenon. Even then, we are told that "progress" is being made by the aquaculture industry, which has reduced its dependence on forage fish by using "vegetable proteins, algae and other nutrients." Aquaculture (fish farming, a technological fix) was the human response to peak wild-caught fish, which occurred in the 1990's. Also note that the use of "other nutrients" in aquaculture is yet another example of the usual technological fix in a context where humans do not have the capacity to make clearly needed changes in their behavior.
Regarding Pacific sardines, let us turn to the longer-term historical context. This graph is from an influential paper called Reconstruction of the history of Pacific sardine and northern anchovy populations over the past two millennia (Tim Baumgartner, et.al., 1992, hat tip reader Brian). Here is Figure 7 from the paper (the reconstruction).
Sardine biomass (top) is measured in million metric tons. You will recall what NOAA's Alec McCall said above, repeated here for your convenience.
“I made a graph of sardine abundance,” says NOAA’s MacCall. “I started at 3 million tons in 1930. By 1970, my pencil lead was too thick to show the [paucity] we had left. It was less than one thousandth of what we began with.”
And in yesterday's post, I used this NOAA graph, again repeated for your convenience.
You can see that the total estimated Sardine population (since 1993) peaked at 1,037,000 million tons in 2007 before ocean cooling caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, exacerbated by overfishing, caused the population to crash.
What is the lesson to be learned here? Simply put, the sardine population baseline has shifted, as discussed Flatland Part II (review that essay). Over the last two thousand years, sardine populations fluctuated wildly, but in this long-term boom & bust cycle, the booms were very large. Alec McCall's reconstruction in modern times reveals that the last time sardine populations were as large as 3 million tons was back in the early 1930's. In contemporary times, the population reached a mere 1 million tons before natural cycles and human harvesting caused another crash.
In short, while humans can apply industrial harvesting methods to catch sardines, the population will very likely never get as large as it was in the early 1930's because it will never get the chance to get that large. If sardine populations rebound anytime soon—that's a big IF—the inevitable human imperative to exploit them will kick in again, and we will be back in the smaller boom & bust cycle we have seen since the 1950's collapse [graph below].
Sardine landings, in million metric tons (red line, top panel). Look at the data after 1990. Sardine fishing was largely prohibited from 1967-1986. Source
Finally, let us turn to future risk for Pacific sardines and the ecosystem in California's coastal waters. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that ecosystem is increasingly a fucking disaster. I will quote from SFgate.com's report, as I did yesterday (some of this duplicates text quoted above).
The [sardine] collapse this year is the latest in a series of alarming die-offs, sicknesses and population declines in the ocean ecosystem along the West Coast. Anchovies, which thrive in cold water, have also declined over the past decade due largely to fluctuating ocean temperatures and a lack of zooplankton, their food of choice.
The number of herring seen in San Francisco Bay has fluctuated wildly, reaching a historic low in 2009.
Record numbers of starving sea lions have recently been washing up on beaches in California because there aren’t enough sardines and anchovies for pups to eat. Fisheries scientists estimate that 70 percent of sea lion pups will die this year due to a lack of food.
Brown pelicans, too, have suffered from mass reproductive failures and are turning up sick and dead in California and Oregon. A 2010 study by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Geological Survey and other scientific organizations found that many of the starving and emaciated pelicans are eating worms and other prey inconsistent with their normal diet of anchovies and sardines.
Strange diseases have also been proliferating in the sea. Large numbers of sea lions have recently been found convulsing with seizures caused by a neurotoxin found in algae blooms or red tides. The blooms suddenly proliferate for unknown reasons, cover large areas and infuse shellfish, mussels, anchovies, sardines and other filter feeders with toxins that are then consumed by sea lions.
The number of epileptic sea lions has been growing for at least a decade, according to researchers...
You get the idea.
It seems, then, that Pacific sardines will have to rebound in an increasingly disrupted ecosystem. This next text is from the environment 360 article quoted above (emphasis added).
Steve Marx, who directs the Pew Charitable Trusts North Pacfic and U.S. oceans program, says that a larger problem is managing fisheries on an individual basis rather than an ecosystem-wide scale. “We could sit here all day and argue about sardine management — if it’s too much, not enough or just right,” says Marx. “We’re fighting over the last sardine rather than looking at what’s coming down the pike.”
Exactly right. You will recall that the NPR story quoted above cites a Pew Charitable Trust researcher to make the comforting point that overfishing did not cause (or even exacerbate) the sardines collapse. And now we've got another Pew researcher (Steve Marx) talking about "fighting over the last sardine." Jesus wept.
And what’s coming down the pike is worrisome. Sardines fare better in warmer water, so theoretically they should do well as global warming heats the oceans. But it’s difficult to predict exactly how these conditions will affect ocean currents, oxygen levels, and other variables — such as the massive toxic algal bloom just detected off the U.S. West Coast — that impact marine ecosystem health.
As U.S. Pacific coastal waters warm, they have been losing oxygen, which tends to reduce nutrient availability and “compress habitat,” according to David Checkley of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. This “more than likely [will] make it a little bit tougher for sardines and perhaps exacerbate their decline,” he says.
So what’s the prognosis for Pacific sardines? Will they rebound as they have in the past? That’s the big question, particularly given climate change.
“We know the ocean is warming,” says Checkley. “When you impose natural variability on top of that, an extreme ‘natural’ event becomes even more extreme,” he says. “That’s what we’ve been seeing, and I expect we’ll see even more of that in the future.”
Yes. Will the Pacific sardine population rebound as they have in the past? What we do know is that overfishing very likely made a natural population crash much worse (yesterday's post).
I am not in the business of making specific predictions about the future. What I can tell you is that humans will behave in the future as they have in the past. And if that's the case, the prognosis for the Pacific sardine is not good.
The more you think about it, the more surprising it is that we've lasted this long really. I mean, as a species (and this is off the top of my head):
We breed like rabbits (that's meant to be sarcastic).
We fight over every scrap of territory available.
We either eat or kill every animal that gets in our way while taking that territory, and then replace native fauna with food animals.
We use every available natural resource we can get hold of, then seem surprised when things run out and we have to either look for more or find a new patch of unused territory with some resource left, and then we fight for that territory if someone else already has it.
(As you've just pointed out) we strip the seas of food fish and then again seem surprised when they disappear.
Although we talk about it a lot and set ourselves rules that are supposed to make us 'better', we seem incapable of being altruistic at a larger scale than a local 'tribal' unit size, and greed always wins out.
We seem totally incapable of actually learning from any of this behaviour (as in, we cannot overcome any of our flatland biological programming in order to stop ourselves) but become better and better at rationalising behaviours instead.
If there was a God, surely he would have switched us off and on again by now, we've plainly crashed.
Posted by: Mike Cooper | 06/23/2015 at 12:38 PM