D.B. Pleschner: Sardines are not being overfished

In recent weeks, sardines have been a hot news topic again. Environmental groups like Oceana complain that the sardine population is collapsing just like it did in the mid-1940s. They blame “overfishing” as the reason and maintain that the fishery should be shut down completely.

Today, in truth, Pacific sardines are perhaps the best-managed fishery in the world — the poster fish for effective ecosystem-based management. The current harvest control rule — established in 2000 and updated last year with more accurate science — sets a strict harvest guideline that considers ocean conditions and automatically reduces the catch limit as the biomass declines.

If the temperature is cold — which hampers sardine recruitment — the harvest rate is low. And if the population size decreases, both the harvest rate and the allowable catch automatically decrease.

Current management sets aside a 150,000 metric ton reserve off the top of the stock assessment and automatically closes the directed fishery when the biomass estimate falls below that level, which it did in the latest stock assessment, after four years of abnormally cold La Niña ocean conditions.

In fact, the truth is much more complicated than environmentalists would lead you to believe. It’s inaccurate and disingenuous to compare today’s fishery management with the historic sardine fishery collapse that devastated Monterey’s Cannery Row.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, the fishery harvest averaged more than 43 percent of the standing sardine stock. Plus, there was little regulatory oversight and no limit on the annual catch.

Today, based on the latest stock assessment, the U.S. exploitation rate has averaged about 11 percent, ranging as low as 6 percent, since the return of federal management in 2000.

Here’s where complications begin because scientists recognize two stocks on the West Coast: the northern or “cold” stock ranges from northern Baja California to Canada during warm-water oceanic cycles and retracts during cold-water cycles.

A southern or “temperate” stock ranges from southern Baja to San Pedro, in Southern California. The federal Pacific Fishery Management Council manages only the northern stock.

Doing the math, our current fishery harvest is less than one-quarter of the rate observed during the historical sardine collapse.

In fact, the current sardine harvest rule is actually more precautionary than the original rule it replaced. It does this by producing an average long-term population size at 75 percent of the unfished size, leaving even more fish in the water, vs. 67 percent in the original rule. The original harvest rule reduced the minimum harvest rate to 5 percent during cold periods. The present has a minimum rate of 0 percent during cold periods.

The so-called “sardine crash due to overfishing” mantra now peddled by Oceana isn’t anything of the sort. It’s simply natural fluctuations in biomass that follow the changing conditions of the ocean, reflected in part by sea temperature.

In April, the council will discuss the most recent sardine assessment report and decide on future management measures. It is important to understand that the sardine stock assessment is a conservative estimate based on acoustic surveys that miss sardines in the upper 10 meters of the water column, above the down-looking acoustic transducer, and in shallow near-shore waters where survey vessels cannot go. It’s really a question of scale, fishermen say. While they acknowledge sardines’ downward trend, fishermen question the accuracy of the total number of sardines that the stock assessment estimates.

California’s wetfish industry relies on a complex of coastal pelagic species including mackerels, anchovy and market squid as well as sardines. Sardines typically school with all these species, so a small allowance of sardine caught incidentally in these other fisheries will be necessary to keep wetfish boats fishing and processors’ doors open.

Sardines are critically important to California’s historic wetfish industry as well as the Golden State. This industry produces on average 80 percent of total fishery landings, and close to 40 percent of dockside value. A total prohibition on sardine landings could curtail the wetfish industry and seriously harm California’s fishing economy.

D.B. Pleschner is executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, a nonprofit dedicated to research and to promote sustainable wetfish resources.

Posted in http://www.montereyherald.com 04/04/15

Oceans might take 1,000 years to recover from climate change, study suggests

Sea urchins disappeared for thousands of years during ancient warming periods that could be a model of future climate change, a new study shows. Here, the shells of modern sea urchins lie in a tide pool in Corona del Mar. (Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)

By Geoffrey Mohan

Naturally occurring climate change lowered oxygen levels in the deep ocean, decimating a broad spectrum of seafloor life that took some 1,000 years to recover, according to a study that offers a potential window into the effects of modern warming.

Earth’s recovery from the last glacial period, in fact, was slower and more brutal than previously thought, according to the study, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers deciphered that plotline from a 30-foot core of sea sediments drilled from the Santa Barbara Basin containing more than 5,000 fossils spanning nearly 13,000 years.

“The recovery does not happen on a century scale; it’s a commitment to a millennial-scale recovery,” said Sarah Moffitt, a marine ecologist at UC Davis’ Bodega Marine Laboratory and lead author of the study. “If we see dramatic oxygen loss in the deep sea in my lifetime, we will not see a recovery of that for many hundreds of years, if not thousands or more.”

Studies already have chronicled declines in dissolved oxygen in some areas of Earth’s oceans. Such hypoxic conditions can expand when ocean temperatures rise and cycles that carry oxygen to deeper areas are interrupted.

As North American glaciers retreated during a warming period 14,700 years ago, an oxygen-sensitive community of  seafloor invertebrates that included sea stars, urchins, clams and snails nearly vanished from the fossil record within about 130 years, the researchers found.

“We found incredible sensitivity across all of these taxonomic groups, across organisms that you would recognize, that you could hold in your hand, organisms that build and create ecosystems that are really fundamental to the way ecosystems function,” Moffitt said. “They were just dramatically wiped out by the abrupt loss of oxygen.”

That highly diverse community soon was replaced with a relatively narrow suite of bizarre and extreme organisms similar to those found near deep-ocean vents and methane seeps in modern oceans, Moffitt said.

Evidence of that transition was confined to such a narrow band of sediments that the turnover could have been “nearly instantaneous,” the study concluded.

Then, beginning around 13,500 years ago, the seafloor community began a slow recovery with the rise of grazers that fed on bacterial mats. Recovery eventually was driven by a fluctuation back toward glaciation during the Younger Dryas period, a cooling sometimes called the Big Freeze.

“The biological community takes 1,000 years to truly recover to the same ecological level of functioning,” Moffitt said. “And the community progresses through really interesting and bizarre states before it recovers the kind of biodiversity that was seen prior to the warming.”

That relatively brief freeze also ended abruptly around 11,700 years ago, virtually wiping out all the seafloor metazoans, the study found. They were gone within 170 years and did not appear again for more than 4,000 years, according to the study.

The climate changes chronicled in the study arose from natural cycles involving Earth’s orbit of the sun, and the oxygen declines that ensued were more extreme than those that have occurred in modern times, the study noted.

Still, the abrupt fluctuations offer a glimpse at the duration of the effects of climate change driven by human activity pumping more planet-warming gases into Earth’s atmosphere, Moffitt said.

“What this shows us is that there are major biomes on this planet that are on the table, that are on the chopping block for a future of abrupt climate warming and unchecked greenhouse gas emissions,” Moffitt said. “We as a society and civilization have to come to terms with the things that we are going to sacrifice if we do not reduce our greenhouse gas footprint.”

Read original post: http://www.latimes.com

Feds likely to shut down sardine fishing on West Coast

Please read the CWPA: Comment to PFMC.

JEFF BARNARD Associated Press Apr 4, 2015

West Coast fisheries managers will likely shut down sardine fishing this year as numbers decline, echoing a previous collapse that decimated a thriving industry and increasing worries that other species might be withheld from the commercial market.

Fishermen are resigned to not being able to get sardines, but they hope the Pacific Fishery Management Council will not be so concerned that it sets the level for incidental catch of sardines at zero, shutting down other fisheries, such as mackerel, anchovies and market squid, which often swim with sardines.

Sardines were a thriving fishery on the West Coast from World War I through World War II, and the cannery-lined waterfront in Monterey, California, became the backdrop for John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel, “Cannery Row.” The fishery industry crashed in the 1940s, and riding the book’s popularity, Cannery Row became a tourist destination, with restaurants and hotels replacing the canneries.

The industry revived in the 1990s, when fisheries developed in Oregon and Washington waters. Today, there are about 100 boats with permits to fish for sardines on the West Coast, about half the number during the heyday. Much of the catch, landed from Mexico to British Columbia, is exported to Asia and Europe, where some is canned, and the rest goes for bait. West Coast landings have risen from a value of $1.4 million in 1991 to a peak of $21 million in 2012, but are again declining.

“The industry survives fishing on a complex,” of species, said Diane Pleschner-Steele, director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, which represents 63 California-based fishing boats. “Sardines, up until this point, have been one very important leg of a three- or four-legged stool…. Now we don’t have sardines. Our fleet is scrambling.”

The latest estimates of how many Pacific sardines are schooling off Oregon, California and Washington have fallen below the mandatory cutoff line. The council cut harvests by two-thirds last year, and meets April 12 in Rohnert Park, California, to set the latest sardine harvest.

The conservation group Oceana is urging the council to immediately shut down sardine fishing, and not wait until the new season starts July 1. The group wants incidental catch limits set at zero, leaving as much food as possible in the ocean for sea lions and other wildlife, and speeding the rebuilding process for sardines.

Ben Enticknap of Oceana acknowledged that sardines naturally go through large population swings, but he argued that fishing since 2007 has exceeded their reproduction rate, exacerbating the numbers collapse.

“Previous stock assessments were way too optimistic and weren’t matching up with what was observed on the water,” Enticknap said. “The sea lions and sea birds have been starving since 2013, pelicans since 2010. Everyone knew something was going on because there wasn’t enough food to eat for these predators. Now this stock assessment comes out saying that the sardine population is much lower than they had previously expected.”

David Crabbe, a squid fishing boat owner and council member, said he would expect the council to allow incidental catch to reduce the impact on the fleet.

The latest stock assessments vary between 133,000 metric tons, and 97,000 metric tons, both below the 150,000 metric tons cutoff, and less than 10 percent of the 2006 peak of 1.4 million metric tons.

The stock assessment is conducted by boat. As the research boats cruise the water, an acoustic signal is emitted, which bounces back with information on what kinds and how many fish are nearby. Stock assessors also estimate how many sardine eggs are floating in the water, and how many sardines are spawning off California, said Kerry Griffin, a staff officer for the council.

Fishermen are unhappy with the stock assessments, Pleschner-Steele said. They say the acoustic gear is too deep in the water and misses fish on the surface, where they feed.

Read original post: utsandiego.com

Comment to Pacific Fishery Management Council

INFORMATION COMPILED BY DR. RICHARD PARRISH

“The reason that the sardine population has declined so rapidly in the last few years is exceedingly simple.  The story is easily seen in the figures I have attached here.

There was a very poor year-class in 2010 followed by 3 years of total recruitment failure.  Both the sardine stock assessment and the Acoustic-Trawl series clearly show this. End of story.

The sardine control rule did exactly what it was designed to do.   It has shut down the directed fishery after a series of poor recruitment years. — Richard Parrish

Sardine recruitment in billions of one-year-old fish; 2010 was a very poor reproductive year and it was followed by three years of complete reproductive failure (2011, 12, 13). The estimate for 2014 is a statistical forecast based on the average recruits per spawner. Few 2014 sardines have been observed. (Hill et al 2015 Sardine Stock Assessment)

The spawning stock biomass fell from about 600,000 mt in 2010 to a bit over 100,000 mt in 2015. With no recruitment, biomass drops very fast with or without a fishery. The same thing happened in the Japanese Sardine fishery about 20 years ago.

Here is the Acoustic survey data showing again the complete reproductive failure in the 2011-13 year classes.

Sea Lion pups are starving in Southern California and Oceana claims it is due to overfishing of sardine. Here are the food habits of sardine. They are 8th in abundance in the California sea lion diet.

Lowry, M. S. and J. V. Carretta. 1999. Market squid (Loligo opalescens) in the diet of California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) in southern California (1981-1995). CalCOFI Rep. 40:196-207.

Here is the time series of sea lion pups. This is used as the primary population index. The most recent total estimate is as follows: (from CALIFORNIA SEA LION (Zalophus californianus ): U.S. Stock. Revised 12/15/2011)

POPULATION SIZE

The entire population cannot be counted because all age and sex classes are not ashore at the same time. In lieu of counting all sea lions, pups are counted during the breeding season (because this is the only age class that is ashore in its entirety), and the number of births is estimated from the pup count. The size of the population is then estimated from the number of births and the proportion of pups in the population. Censuses are conducted in July after all pups have been born. To estimate the number of pups born, the pup count for rookeries in southern California in 2008 (59,774) was adjusted for an estimated 15% pre-census mortality (Boveng 1988; Lowry et al. 1992), giving an estimated 68,740 live births in the population. The fraction of newborn pups in the population (23.2%) was estimated from a life table derived for the northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus) (Boveng 1988, Lowry et al. 1992) which was modified to account for the growth rate of this California sea lion population (5.4% yr-1, see below). Multiplying the number of pups born by the inverse of this fraction (4.317) results in a population estimate of 296,750.

Minimum Population Estimate

The minimum population size was determined from counts of all age and sex classes that were ashore at all the major rookeries and haul-out sites in southern and central California during the 2007 breeding season. The minimum population size of the U.S. stock is 153,337 (NMFS unpubl. data). It includes all California sea lions counted during the July 2007 census at the Channel Islands in southern California and at haul-out sites located between Point Conception and Point Reyes, California. An additional unknown number of California sea lions are at sea or hauled out at locations that were not censused.

Current Population Trend

Trends in pup counts from 1975 through 2008 are shown in Figure 2

INFORMATION COMPILED BY CWPA

ALLOWING AN ADEQUATE INCIDENTAL SARDINE CATCH IN OTHER CPS FISHERIES IS CRITICAL TO SUSTAIN CALIFORNIA’S WETFISH INDUSTRY