NGO critics of California’s sardine rules miss that better science mean conservative management

Published with permission of SEAFOODNEWS.COM

By D. B. Pleschner [Opinion]  Dec 8, 2014

D.B. Pleschner: The truth about new sardine fishing limits

Recently the Pacific Fishery Management Council voted to change the sardine harvest control rule, increasing the upper limit of the sardine harvest fraction from 15 percent to 20 percent. The decision came after an exhaustive set of scientific workshops and analysis involving more than 60 people, held over the past two years to respond to a research paper that suggested that sea surface temperature (SST) measured at Scripps Pier in Southern California, which had been employed as a proxy for sardine recruitment, was no longer correlated with recruitment success.

But apparently this fact was lost on environmental activists who cried foul to the media, claiming that sardines are crashing, and the management response to the crisis is to just fish harder.

Claims that the council voted for a more aggressive fishing rate miss the point: nothing could be further from the truth. But the truth is complicated.

We know that California’s sardine population is strongly influenced by ocean temperatures: warmer waters tend to increase sardine productivity, while colder waters tend to decrease it.

“The northern sardine stock has been declining for several years due to poor recruitment, and there is concern that it will decline further in the next couple of years,” says Dr. Richard Parrish, one of the authors of the original sardine control rule. “Although no one can predict the environmental conditions that will occur in the future, the pessimistic view is that the northern stock will continue to decline and the optimistic view is that the present warm water conditions will herald increased recruitment.”

“Whichever occurs first,” he adds, “the past, present and management team-recommended sardine harvest control rules were all designed to automatically regulate the exploitation rates both by reducing the quota and reducing the harvest rates as the stock declines, and by shutting down the fishery if the biomass falls below 150,000 mt.”

The original sardine analysis, made in 1998, was updated by a new analysis that found offshore sea temperatures slightly better correlated with sardine productivity than the measurements made at Scripps Pier. Population simulations made with the updated information that included the population increase in recent decades show that the sardine stock is about 50 percent more productive than thought in 1998. The management team therefore recommended raising the upper bound of fishing fraction from 15 percent to 20 percent to account for the new best available science.

But that doesn’t mean that the catch quota for the coming year will be raised. This is a long-term harvest control rule that simply follows better scientific modeling efforts.

The new rules will determine fishing rate just as before: If the temperature is cold, the harvest will be kept low; if the population size decreases, both the harvest rate and the allowable catch will automatically decrease. In fact, the new sardine harvest rule is actually more precautionary than the original rule it is replacing. 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, very complicated rule, has a minimum rate of 0 percent during cold periods.

What’s more, the harvest fraction will only be applied after subtracting 150,000 mt from the sardine biomass estimated in the next year’s stock assessment.

Bottom line: The California sardine may be the best-managed fishery of its type in the world — the poster fish for effective ecosystem-based management.

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

Read original article here.

When is a pilchard not a pilchard? When it’s a sardine and “sardine” sales are booming in England

Posted with permission of SeaFoodNews.com

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [The Independent] By Jamie Merrill – November 4, 2014

(The terms sardine and pilchard are not precise, and what is meant depends on the region. The United Kingdom’s Sea Fish Industry Authority, for example, classifies sardines as young pilchards. One criterion suggests fish shorter in length than 6 inches are sardines, and larger ones pilchards.)

Waitrose has reported a 19 per cent rise in sales of the once-forgotten fish, while high-end restaurants have put them back on the menu

Peter Bullock has been fishing the choppy waters off the southern tip of Cornwall for more than 20 years. It’s only relatively recently, though, that the skipper of the St Asthore has started taking the 46ft trawler out at night from Newlyn in search of sardines.

After decades of decline, sales of sardines are booming again; Mr Bullock and his two young deckhands have their work cut out. And it’s during the hours of darkness that the slippery, six-inch fish congregate off St Michael’s Mount in vast shoals.

Waitrose has just reported a 19 per cent rise in sales of the once-forgotten fish, while high-end restaurants from Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen to Duck and Waffle in the City of London and Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant have put them back on the menu.

“The chap that started it all about 10 years back was called Nutty Noah. He lived down the coast and bought an old ring net from France and set out to catch pilchards, which he re-branded as Cornish sardines. In the end, he caught so much he actually sank his boat under the weight,” said Mr Bullock, 39, as we left harbour.

Before Nutty Noah came along, the fish was marketed as the pilchard. It was salted and sold in vast quantities during the 19th century, however, tinned salmon imports from Canada and the arrival of Pacific tuna had all but killed the industry by the 1990s. The fisherman admits, though, that the two fish are “essentially the same”: a pilchard is just a sardine that is more than six inches long.

Either way, turning them into Cornish sardines was “a piece of marketing genius, pure and simple”, he says. It was a sales wheeze that would have delighted Charles Saatchi. A few years ago there were no sardine boats at Newlyn; now the St Asthore is joined by five rival boats as we set out to sea. This season is the seventh year he has fished for sardines, and he has often brought in as much as 20 tonnes of fish a night. The fishery is certified by the Marine Stewardship Council and backed by Greenpeace.

“It’s the rebranding that’s made pilchards really popular,” explains the skipper as he spots a shoal on his sonar and prepares his crew to “shoot” the ring net around them. “You just have to think of the romance of a sardine on the barbecue and think of the Mediterranean.”

Bringing in the fish, which come close to the surface at night to feed, is a frantic affair, during which Peter Bullock abandons the cockpit, puts on his waterproofs and joins his crew hauling in the nets. The reward, after 45 minutes of silent working, is a load of about four tonnes.

Watching is Jeremy Ryland Langley, the fisheries and aquaculture manager at Waitrose. He’s the man responsible for taking endangered Atlantic salmon off the shelves of the store in the 1990s. More recently he brought in a sustainability and fish traceability policy that has won plaudits from Greenpeace.

For him this fishery is ideal. “The oceans are vital to our existence as a species and, for most of us, fish is the last truly wild food we’ll eat, so getting this right is crucial. What we love about this fishery and Peter’s boat is that we know the fishermen, we know exactly where they are fishing and we know the fish stocks here are healthy.”

A hundred miles away on the north Devon coast, the story is very different. When the European Commission cut fish quotas, the Government’s Marine Management Organisation imposed a temporary ban on ray fishing which threatens to cost the area £100m a year. In Ilfracombe, a brand new £300,000 trawler has sat idle having never been to sea, while at Appledore the fish dock has closed until at least the end of December.

Newlyn has its problems, including an outdated fish market without an internet connection. But the sardine population has remained strong, as the skipper of the St Asthore explains, because the north Cornish coast “doesn’t have the harbours to support sardine boats”. This means there is a ready-made reserve which acts as a “breeding stronghold” for the species.

And last month an EU-backed study found that smaller fish such as sardines had benefited from the over-fishing of larger predator fish, such as sea bass, ray and John Dory.

For fish buyers like Ryland Langley, “part of [this] problem is that it is easy to buy cheap fish if you don’t care where it comes from. What’s hard for people like me and shoppers, is that it’s really hard to buy ethically sourced, high-quality fish that you can trace exactly to a single fishery. That’s what we have here and that’s what we should all be asking for at the fish counter.”

Read original post: SeafoodNews.com

Sardine lover meets his match at The Taste’s ‘Fish Fight’

Michael Cimarusti, left, the gracious winner, and the still-happy loser. (Jenna Schoenefeld / Los Angeles Times)

By Russ Parsons | Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

I like almost everything about sardines. I like to cook them, I like to eat them. Heck, when I visit aquariums I even like to watch them swim around in circles. That’s the only explanation I can offer for how I found myself standing on a stage Sunday night engaged in a cook-off with one of America’s great chefs.

In the final night of this year’s The Taste, Michael Cimarusti from Providence and I were engaged in what we decided to call “The Great Fish Fight,” and the subject was sardines. He won, of course — I told him at one point it was like me playing H-O-R-S-E with Kobe Bryant — but I did get to cook some sardines, so the event wasn’t a total loss on my part.

The whole thing started innocently enough at last year’s Taste when food blogger Sara O’Donnell (Average Betty) tried to instigate an argument between Cimarusti and me about who had the better beard. No vote was taken, but I do think I won by a landslide as people tend to favor elegance over volume.

When she tried to kick up a similar fuss this time around, Cimarusti — perhaps chastened after last year — suggested that instead we should have a sardine cook-off. “Fish-ticuffs” I called it. And, of course, since the whole thing played out in real time on Twitter, there was no way I could back down.

My first challenge was finding sardines to cook. That proved harder than expected. Sardines are a notoriously fickle fish, their population prone to booms and busts. (Interestingly, some marine biologists — and many fishermen — have proposed that there is a sardine-anchovy cycle, with each fish taking dominance over the other for periods of time.)

In good times, sardines are one of the great bargains in the fish market — usually around $2 a pound. We’re in a down cycle for sardines, so I was stymied when I tried to sneak in a little practice beforehand. All my usual suspects, where sardines have been so plentiful in the past, turned up dry.

I ended up using a sardine-like fish I found at Seafood City called something like “Roundhead Scad.” At least I got some practice cleaning — and it actually tasted good.

Cleaning is a big part of sardine cooking. Unlike most fish you buy in the market, sardines are always sold in the round and in their entirety. Cleaning them is not hard, but it is not like buying the usual fillet. Think of it as the difference between cutting up a whole chicken and buying a boneless, skinless breast.

I find sardines react really well to grilling and pair well with big flavors. When I cook them (and maybe I learned this from Cimarusti, years ago — I’ll give him credit anyway), I like to grill them on the skin-side only until the flesh turns color all the way through. This way the skin crisps up nicely, a real plus.

As far as accompaniments, with it being the height of the summer harvest, I decided to pair them with a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and white beans, served with a nice drizzle of a quickly made pesto. It was like a panzanella, but with firm beans instead of tender bread.

Cimarusti opted for another of my favorite sardine dishes, the Sicilian classic pasta con le sarde — sardines mixed with spaghetti, wild fennel fronds and bread crumbs. And he knocked it out of the park.

The judges — KCRW “Good Food” host Evan Kleiman and our own Jonathan Gold — were kind, but it was clear that this was a perfect example of the difference between a good home cook’s dish and what a master chef like Cimarusti can do.

Still, all was not lost — I did get what I think of as my Little League “hardest-trier” award. Afterward Cimarusti gave me all the leftover sardines we hadn’t cooked.

So Monday night, I grilled them. Defeat has never tasted so sweet.

Visit: http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-sardine-the-tastes-fish-fight-20140902-story.html to read the original post and photos of the the Taste food and wine festival

Sardine recovery drives Q1 Chile pelagic catches up 28%, offsetting drop in jack mackerel

May 23, 2014, 2:17 pm
Alicia Villegas  

Sardines. Photo by Juuyoh Tanaka.

Chile’s pelagic landings rose by 27.8% to 522,600 metric tons in the first three months of the year compared to the same period in 2013.

This was driven by good sardine catches, which more than doubled year-on-year.

By the end of March, 197,000t or 52.8% of the quota set for Chile’s sardine fishery in 2014 had been caught, according to Chile’s undersecretariat for fisheries and aquaculture Subpesca.

All of these landings were from the area between the V and X regions.

This means that during the next nine months of the year, catches cannot exceed 176,000t, as the sardine fishery saw the steepest drop in absolute volume of total allowed catches (TAC) for 2014, slashed by 38.3% to 373,000t.

The cut was in response to the steep drop in Chile’s sardine catches last year, which drove pelagic landings down by nearly 650,000t in the first nine months of 2013.

Anchovy catches also nudged up in Q1 this year, but only slightly, by 1.8% to 168,600t year-on-year.

Regions XV and II accounted for most landings (148,000t), which is also 11.2% up from last year’s 165,600t.

Jack mackerel, poor landings

Jack mackerel, the third main pelagic species caught by the Chilean fleet, had poor landings in comparison to sardine and anchovy.
chile_pelagics_q12014

Chile’s pelagic landings in 2014 first three months: jack mackerel (red), anchovy (green) and sardine (purple).

Vessels landed 107,000t of jack mackerel in the three month period, which is 13.9% down as the same time last year, said Subpesca.

Regions V and X were the main jack mackerel’s landings areas, totaling 95,100t, involving a fall of 19% year-on-year.

Cuttlefish catches double

Cuttlefish catches were also up in the first three months of 2014 when compared with the same time a year ago.

“The cuttlefish resource increases strongly, doubling its catches,” Subpesca said.

Cuttlefish landings totaled 37,400t by the end of March, mainly in the V and X regions.

Hake down 47%

On the other hand, hake catches were down 47.3% to 5,000t year-on-year.

Industrial vessels contributed to 37.8% or 1,900t of hake landings, while the artisanal fleet increased its catches by 10.9% to 3,100t.

According to media reports, however, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing of hake in Chile could have totaled 19,000t so far this year.

That would if so represent 83.3% of the total allowable catch for the artisanal fisheries, set at 7,600t.

Landings for mackerel, for its part, also decreased by 33.7% to 9,200t year-on-year.

Sea-lion miseries tied to sardine reduction

Nursing the mammal population back to health raises another question: Do we let nature take its course if there are now too many?

By ERIKA I. RITCHIE / STAFF WRITER
Published: May 6, 2014
Photo: ANNA REED, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Mass beachings of malnourished sea lions in 2013 are likely linked to a drop in sardine populations near Channel Islands rookeries where thousands of sea lions are born each year, federal officials say.

More than 1,600 sea lion pups washed up on beaches from San Diego to Ventura between January and April 2013 – starving, dehydrated and suffering from a variety of diseases.

The mass stranding led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries service to form a task force of scientists to research what could have caused the unusual mortality event.

In the past two months, 650 sea lions have been found on beaches in similar conditions.

“Although the pups showed signs of some viruses and infections, findings indicate that this event was not caused by disease, rather by the lack of high-quality, close-by food sources for nursing mothers,” said Sarah Wilkin, coordinator of the Marine Mammal Health Stranding and Response Program for the National Marine Fisheries.

The task force’s scientists considered prey, oceanic conditions, viruses, bacteria, toxins and even radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. The lack of sardines has been the only clear indicator of the mass stranding.
SARDINE DECLINE

Sardines, a fatty, silvery fish, provide a high level of nutrients not only to sea lions but also to seals, elephant seals and humpback whales, many of which are also found along the Channel Islands and compete for food with the sea lions.

Sardine numbers are in steep decline, and those that are available have shifted spawning grounds, previously surveyed within 50 miles of the sea lion rookeries, to deep water up to 120 miles from shore even as sea lion numbers are booming.

Scientists say the absence of sardines near the rookeries likely created challenges for mothers in feeding their pups and forced juveniles to swim farther to find other forage fish like market squid and juvenile rock fish. Most sea lions hunt within 60 miles of their rookeries.

In the 1940 and ’50s, sardines were heavily fished off the coast of Monterrey in Northern California. Their numbers drastically declined for 30 years and then rebounded in the 1980s, according to task force member Sam McClatchie, an oceanographer with Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla who has conducted fish number studies on sardines.

In 2006, sardine numbers again began to crash, McClatchie said. Last December, the fishing quota was dropped to 5,446 metric tons for California, Oregon and Washington from January to June. In the same time period the previous year, the quota was 18,073 metric tons.

Sardines and other pelagic fish such as anchovies, market squid, rock fish and hag are known to fluctuate in populations and locations. The fish are mobile, migrating from Baja to Vancouver each year.

But sardines, while flexible, are easily affected by changes in ocean temperature. A dip of water temperatures in the south-flowing California current in the last decade could be reducing their numbers off the Southern California coast.

There are big differences in temperature between Baja, Vancouver and the California central coast along with seasonal and regional differences that cause volatile swings in sardine populations. While those conditions have brought a boom in some species, like market squid, they have pushed out sardines.

“In a year where conditions are good, we can get a lot of fish,” McClatchie said. “They often live five to eight years and in a good pulse, a lot of eggs can be produced related to the number of mothers there are. How many survive depends on environmental conditions and how many are eating them.”
2013 BEACHINGS UNUSUAL

Last year’s stranding was not the largest in the California, but the timing and location made it unique, said Justin Viezbicke, California stranding network coordinator for National Marine Fisheries.

Sea lions began washing ashore in January, much earlier than usual. Sea lion pups are born in summer and stay with their mothers for 10 to 11 months, so rescue centers don’t usually see strandings until June.

View the original post: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/-613015–.html?page=1

Has There Really Been A Sardine Crash?

Sardines have been a hot news topic in recent weeks. Environmental groups and others have claimed that the sardine population is collapsing like it did in the mid-1940s.

The environmental group Oceana has been arguing this point loudly in order to shut down the sardine fishery. That’s why they filed suit in federal court, which is now under appeal, challenging the current sardine management.

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

Read the full story here.

Viewpoints: The state of sardine populations

Sardines have been a hot news topic in recent weeks. Environmental groups and others have trumpeted that the sardine population is collapsing like it did in the mid-1940s.

The environmental group Oceana has been arguing this point loudly in order to shut down the sardine fishery. That’s why it filed suit in federal court, in a case now under appeal, challenging the current sardine management.

So what is the truth about the state of sardines? It’s much more complicated than environmentalists would lead you to believe.

In fact, 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 43 percent or more of the standing sardine stock. Plus, there was little regulatory oversight and no limit on the annual catch.

Today, the allowed annual U.S. catch totals roughly 5 percent and coastal sardine exploitation averages less than 15 percent of the northern stock.

Read the full story here.

As sardines vanish from Southern California coastal waters, fishermen rely on squid and anchovy

Larry Derr was as prepared as any longtime Southern California bait fisherman for the disappearance of the Pacific sardines he has pulled up by the ton since the 1980s.

He can fish anchovies instead and, if those become scarce, there’s been a local surge in market squid to keep him in business.

But the fickle sardines have been so abundant for so many years – sometimes holding court as the most plentiful fish in coastal waters – that it was a shock when he couldn’t find one of the shiny silver- blue coastal fish all summer, even though this isn’t the first time they’ve vanished.

And the similar, but smaller, anchovies have proven a poor replacement since sardines became scarce. Fortunately, a boom in market squid has propelled Derr and other coastal pelagic fishers.

In three days of nighttime fishing last week, Derr barely cleared a measly 20 scoops of anchovies to sell.

“A couple days ago we caught a ton of anchovies,” Derr said, keeping a vigilant eye for the telltale red mass on the In-Seine’s sonar during a predawn hunt Saturday. The screen remained black with irregularly dispersed green dots representing schools too small to fish. “We want this to be solid red.”

Though sardines aren’t as valuable as tuna or rockfish, they’re an important food source for larger fish, marine mammals like sea lions, dolphins and whales, and sea birds that can spot them from the air and dive for them.

Some have attributed recent rashes of sea lion pup and pelican deaths to the sardine population decline, which began a few years ago and was officially recognized in December when the fishing quota was dropped to just 5,446 metric tons for all of California, Oregon and Washington from January to June. In the same time period last year, the quota was 18,073 metric tons.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council lowered the quota in November after years of sardine stock decline from 2006, when 1.4 million tons were estimated to be swimming around the north Pacific. This year, their numbers are believed to be less than 400,000 metric tons.

Read the full article here.

Cyclical sardine stock decline sets off efforts by greens to suspend West Coast fishery

GRANTS PASS — Concerned sardine numbers may be starting to collapse, conservation groups are calling on federal fishery managers to halt West Coast commercial sardine fishing to give the species a better chance to rebound.

“If they continue fishing them hard, they will go down a lot faster, and it will take them longer to recover,” said Ben Enticknap, of the conservation group Oceana, that wants a suspension through the first half of 2014.

The fishing industry counters that while there are signs sardines are going into a natural cycle of decline, fishery management has taken precautions to prevent overfishing, which was common in the past.

Stock
“Today’s precautionary management framework cannot be compared to the historic fishery, which harvested as much as 50 percent of the standing stock,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, which represents sardine fishermen and processors. She is also vice chairman of a committee that advises the federal Pacific Fishery Management Council on sardines and related species.

Current harvest rates range from 15 percent to 25 percent, depending on the size of stocks.

The council plans to vote Sunday in Costa Mesa, Calif., on an interim harvest quota for the first half of 2014. The council has no specific proposal before it, council staffer Kerry Griffin said.

The latest sardine assessment prepared for the council says that stocks at the start of 2014 are expected to be 28 percent of their peak in 2006, when they hit 1.4 million metric tons. The current management plan for sardines says a decline of another 60 percent, to 150 metric tons, would require halting fishing off the West Coast.

Landings in Oregon, Washington and California have been valued at $9 million to $15 million a year. Most of the fish are exported to Asia, where some are canned and others used for bait for tuna.

Read the full story here.