How to Eat Sardines Sustainably

Please note that the quote below by Geoff Shester incorrectly states that most of California Pacific Sardines go to tuna farms. In actuality, most CA sardines are exported for canning for human consumption. It should also be noted that the Lenfest Report identified CA’s forage fisheries to be one of the most precautionary, sustainable forage fisheries in the world. California limits harvesting to only allow 2% of the total forage pool, leaving 98% in the ocean for other marine life

Written by Miriam Goldstein

I only eat anchovies with Caesar salad, and am rather fond of the tiny fish that add a bit of strong flavor to the romaine lettuce. I’m unusual for wanting to get even that close to the tiny, oily fish – sardines, anchovy, menhaden –  that used to be a staple of regular American food. That’s why Julia Whitty’s recent article in Mother Jones in which she encourages consumers to pause before they “ take a bite of that sardine sandwich” was so surprising. You won’t find sardines anywhere on the list of the top 10 consumed seafoods - or do you? Here’s why eating more sardines directly would actually be good for the ocean:

1) The United States Pacific sardine fishery is not overfished. This may be surprising to people who are familiar with the famous collapse of the Monterey (central California) sardine fishery, which was described by John Steinbeck in his book Cannery Row. Puzzlement over this collapse launched one of the most important long-term oceanographic investigations of all time, the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation, which continues to provide critical scientific information to this day. Over 50 years of investigation has shown that this crash actually WASN’T caused by overfishing – at least not directly.

Sardine and anchovy populations are actually  tied directly to large-scale climatic conditions – if they’re favorable, there’s lots of fish. If they’re unfavorable, the fish crash. Overfishing may have exacerbate the crash and slowed recovery, but it probably didn’t cause it directly. Some researchers are predicting a similar sardine crash this year due to unfavorable climatic conditions similar to those seen before the late 1940s crash, and are encouraging managers to decrease sardine quotes in order to speed post-crash recovery. (Though this is controversial – see this response).

Historically, sardine & anchovy fisheries in other parts of the world, such as the South American anchoveta fishery (the biggest fishery in the world) are less well regulated. Overfishing in these ecosystems leads to no room for error – if there is the slightest change in the climate that causes the  fish to reproduce less fast, the fishery crashes. Buy U.S. Pacific sardines.

2)   Americans should eat more sardines directly, and fewer sardines indirectly. Only about a quarter of the enormous U.S. sardine haul is eaten directly  - the rest are sold as bait or as fishmeal. All of the three most popular U.S. seafoods – shrimp, salmon, and canned tuna – are farmed with fishmeal or caught with bait. This is why Jennifer Jacquet developed her “Eat Like A Pig” campaign. Grist covered this issue in response to Whitty’s article as well:

Geoff Shester, the California program director at Oceana, talked to Grist contributor Clare Leschin-Hoar for the article, “Small fish, big ocean: Saving Pacific forage fish.” We followed up with him to ask his take on sardine-eating. In the case of Pacific sardines, he said that “the lion’s share go to bluefin tuna farms (ranches) in Australia, then to commercial longline bait in international tuna fisheries.” Overall, he says, “consumers are demanding the wrong things. Instead of demanding farmed salmon, which uses at least three pounds of forage fish to get one pound of salmon, people should be demanding the forage fish themselves.”

Also, sardines are healthy! They appear on the New York Times list of the  11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating. Also, food writer Michael Pollan’s Rule 32 (Don’t overlook the oily little fishes”) elaborates further:

Wild fish are among the healthiest things you can eat, yet many wild fish stocks are on the verge of collapse because of overfishing. Avoid big fish at the top of the marine food chain–tuna, swordfish, shark–because they’re endangered, and because they often contain high levels of mercury. Fortunately, a few of the most nutritious wild fish species, including mackerel, sardines, and anchovies, are well managed, and in some cases are even abundant. Those oily little fish are particularly good choices. According to a Dutch proverb: “A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.”

3)   Since sardine and other small forage fish like anchovies and menhadan congregate in single-species schools in the water column (see the awesome photo by Jon Bertsch at the top of this post!), there’s relatively little bycatch. Fishers are able to catch these fish, and only these fish, without accidentally killing a lot of other marine life. This is emphatically not the case with the longline tuna fisheries for which forage fish become bait. Fish farming operations have other significant environmental impacts, such as the infection of wild salmon stocks with farmed salmon parasites and damage to the ocean bottom communities. Eating sardines directly is far better for the ocean environment than filtering them through large predators caught accidentally with more large predators.

Read the full article on DeepSeaNews.

 

NOAA Proposes Removing Eastern Steller Sea Lions from Endangered Species List

Stellar Sea Lions

Juneau, AK – NOAA is proposing to remove the eastern Steller sea lion, currently deemed "threatened," from the list of endangered wildlife, after a status review by its biologists found the species is recovering sufficiently.

"This proposal reflects the continued recovery of the eastern population of Steller sea lions and the strong conservation partnership among NOAA Fisheries, the states, the fishing industry, and other stakeholders," said NOAA's Fisheries Service Alaska Regional Administrator Jim Balsiger.

NOAA Fisheries began a draft status review of the eastern population, which ranges from Alaska's Cape Suckling to California's Channel Islands, in June 2010, and opened a 60-day public comment period. Within a few days, NOAA received two petitions, one from the states of Washington and Oregon, and the other from the state of Alaska, asking that the eastern Steller sea lion be removed from threatened status under the Endangered Species Act.

The draft status review, which was completed in March 2012, shows the eastern Steller sea lion population has met the recovery criteria outlined in the recovery plan, which was developed by NOAA Fisheries in 1992 and revised in 2008.

There were approximately 34,000 eastern Steller sea lions in 1997, when the eastern and western stocks were found to be genetically different from each other. Estimates in 2010 put the eastern population at about 70,000.

The western stock, which ranges from Alaska as far as the Russian Pacific coast, will retain its endangered status.

Read the full news release on the NOAA's website.

 

Online Report: Profiles of North Coast Fishing Communities

Charter boats at Trinidad dock Photo: C. Pomeroy

By: Caroline Pomeroy, Cynthia J. Thomas and Melissa M. Stevens

LA JOLLA, CA – California Sea Grant is pleased to announce the availability of an online edition of "California's North Coast Fishing Communities: Historical Perspective and Recent Trends."

The 340-pp. technical report presents a historic, demographic and economic overview of the region's four major fishing communities: Crescent City in Del Norte County, Trinidad and Eureka/Fields Landing in Humboldt County, and Noyo/Fort Bragg in Mendocino County.

Profiles of each community highlight major commercial and recreational fisheries, their values, fleet sizes and how they have changed over time. There is also key information on fishing infrastructure – such as docks, piers, slips, launch ramps and cold storage facilities – and market channels for local commercial catches. But perhaps the most interesting sections are those that describe the current challenges and outlooks for sustaining the fishing communities.

The report was prepared originally, with funding from the California Coastal Conservancy and NOAA Fisheries in 2010 as a resource for addressing a diversity of fishery management and policy issues. It has since been used to inform local decision-making and to evaluate some of the potential social and economic consequences of establishing marine protected areas along the North Coast.

Sorting fish at Caito Fisheries in Fort Bragg. Photo: C. Pomeroy

"It (the report) is an invaluable reference for fielding public and media requests about local fishing, because it explains the value of our fisheries to the overall port community," said Dan Berman, Director of the Conservation Division for the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District.

"We know what is going on at our docks," said Eureka-based fisherman Dave Bitts, president of Pacific Coast Federation of Fishing Associations and one of the more than 180 fishery participants interviewed for the project. "What the report has done is assemble our knowledge in a way that is accessible to academics, consultants and government workers."

Fisheries managers, both state and federal, are required to consider the social and economic impacts of regulations. "Yet, in-depth social science information on California fishing communities has been quite scarce," said Caroline Pomeroy, a California Sea Grant marine advisor based in Santa Cruz and the lead author of the report, explaining her motivation for pursuing the research.

The full report, executive summary and individual community profiles can be downloaded at the California Sea Grant Extension web page or through the University of California's eScholarship open-access repository.

California Sea Grant is part of NOAA's National Sea Grant, a network of 32 university-based programs.

 

How Well, and How Poorly, We Harvest Ocean Life

Written by Cornelia Dean | Science Writer

 

Overfishing: What Everyone Needs to Know. Ray Hilborn, with Ulrike Hilborn.

To hear some other people tell it, many depleted stocks are recovering nicely.

Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, wades into this disagreement in his new book and comes out with a lucid explication of a highly tangled issue.Each argument, he concludes, has some truth on its side. “It depends on where you look,” he writes. “You can paint horror story after horror story if you want. You can paint success after success.”He navigates the path between horror and success through scores of questions and answers, nearly all of which demonstrate how difficult it is to sort this issue out.Take the most basic question: What is overfishing? There are several answers, the book tells us. There is “yield overfishing,” in which people take so many fish that they leave too few to spawn or catch too many fish before they are grown. Then there is “economic overfishing,” in which economic benefits are less than they could be. If too many boats chase too few fish, for example, the struggle to make a good catch leads to overspending on boats, fuel and so on.(There is also “ecological overfishing,” but that is something we must live with as long as we want to eat fish, Dr. Hilborn says. Fishing by definition alters the marine environment.)Dr. Hilborn tells us of fisheries that succeed — like the halibut industry in Alaska — and fish stocks managed into difficulty, and then out again, like the pollock of the Bering Sea.And he gets into the issue of trawling, in which boats drop weighted nets to the bottom and drag them along, scraping up everything in their path. Critics liken trawling to harvesting timber by clear-cutting. For Dr. Hilborn, this analogy is not always apt, since in some areas the creatures rapidly repopulate the ocean floor.Some countries do well by their fish, he writes, but with one exception they are relatively small: New Zealand, Iceland and Norway. The exception? The United States.The true lesson of this book is that fisheries science is complicated; that the management of any given species must be considered in terms of its ecosystem; that fishing for one species alters the food web as a whole — and that sometimes there is not enough data to make good recommendations.

 

Read the full book review on The New York Times.

 

Scientists To Set Sail To Monitor Sardines

Scientists On Bell M. Shimada To Survey Coastal Waters From Mexico To Santa Barbara. News10 Video

SAN DIEGO -- The sardine population is dwindling and that could have a major impact on San Diego's economy and food supply.

On Tuesday, the research ship Bell M. Shimada made preparations to head out again. This time, scientists will survey coastal waters from Mexico to near Santa Barbara looking for sardines.

Southwest Fisheries Science Center scientist Roger Hewitt, Ph.D., said forage fish like sardines are critical.

"They feed everything that we care about," he said.

Sardines feed not only people – which results in $12 million in commercial fishing revenue in 2010 – but they also feed birds and mammals such as whales and sea lions which are cornerstones of tourism.

"Sardines are used as bait," said Hewitt.

They help fuel the massive sport fishing industry, which brings in more than 250 million a year for San Diego, according to the United Anglers of Southern California, citing a 1985 study.

The last coast-wide survey occurred in 2006 going from Baja California to British Columbia. Scientists will be using echosounding, which is similar to sonar.

Read the rest of the article on 10News.com.

 

Lust, Lies And Empire: The Fishy Tale Behind Eating Fish On Friday

by Maria Godoy It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown thriller: A powerful medieval pope makes a secret pact to prop up the fishing industry that ultimately alters global economics. The result: Millions of Catholics around the world end up eating fish on Fridays as part of a religious observance.This "realpolitik" explanation of why Catholics eat fish on Friday has circulated for so long, many people grew up believing it as fact. Some, myself included, even learned it in Catholic school. It's a humdinger of a tale — the kind conspiracy theorists can really sink their teeth into. But is it true?"Many people have searched the Vatican archives on this, but they have found nothing," says Brian Fagan, a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose book, Fish On Friday, explores the impact of this practice on Western culture.The real economic story behind fish on Fridays turns out to be much better.Let's start with a quick lesson in theology: According to Christian teaching, Jesus died on a Friday, and his death redeemed a sinful world. People have written of fasting on Friday to commemorate this sacrifice as early as the first century.Technically, it's the flesh of warmblooded animals that's off limits — an animal "that, in a sense, sacrificed its life for us, if you will," explains Michael Foley, an associate professor at Baylor University and author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish On Friday?Fish are coldblooded, so they're considered fair game. "If you were inclined to eat a reptile on Friday," Foley tells The Salt, "you could do that, too."Alas, Christendom never really developed a hankering for snake. But fish — well, they'd been associated with sacred holidays even in pre-Christian times. And as the number of meatless days piled up on the medieval Christian calendar — not just Fridays but Wednesdays and Saturdays, Advent and Lent, and other holy days — the hunger for fish grew. Indeed, fish fasting days became central to the growth of the global fishing industry. But not because of a pope and his secret pact.At first, says Fagan, Christians' religious appetite was largely met with herring, a fish that was plentiful but dry and tasteless when smoked or salted. And preservation was a must in medieval times: There was no good way for fresh fish to reach the devout masses. Eventually, cod became all the rage — it tasted better when cured and it lasted longer, too.

 

Read the rest of the article on NPR.

 

PG&E tests bad for sea life and also for fishing industry

 Written By Brian StacyFOR much of the 20th Century Southern California was a world leader in seafood production. The once-thriving tuna fishing fleet, based at the Port of Los Angeles and in San Diego, plied distant waters for months at a time returning to local canneries that employed thousands of people.Today, the U.S. tuna industry is a distant memory, the victim of subsidized foreign competition, unfair trade practices, government over-regulation, and in some cases under-regulation.Historically, California's commercial fishing industry once employed tens of thousands of people in fishing, fish processing, boat building and boat repair and allied industries. Recreational fishing has been a staple of the coastal tourism. Both have been a vibrant part of the California coastal economy, from Eureka to the Mexican border.I fish the waters of the central California coast. Those of us who remain, men and women who work at sea and harvest many of the types of fish we find in the supermarkets and in restaurants, have to be creative, nimble, and able to adapt to a sometimes harsh natural and political environment.It is infuriating when yet another hurdle is erected making it nearly impossible for us to practice our trade. But this time it isn't Mother Nature, imported farm-raised fish, or some government edict. This time it is a public utility - Pacific Gas & Electric, the energy behemoth whose aged gas lines exploded and ravaged the San Bruno community in 2010.PG&E also owns the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, on the San Luis Obispo County coast. Diablo Canyon now threatens the central coast fishing industry, the local marine environment, and the livelihood of both commercial and recreational fishers.Read the rest of the article on Los Angeles Daily News.  

Let 'forage fish' populations double, scientists urge

We appreciate that reporter Tony Barboza differentiated California forage fisheries from the rest of the world.  California's coastal pelagic forage, or "wetfish" fisheries are recognized by internationally respected scientists as having low impacts on the environment.  

 

Indeed, California's wetfish fisheries have one of the lowest harvest rates in the world.  Our visionary ecosystem-based sardine management also was acknowledged by the Lenfest Report.

 

In addition to low harvest rates, California also has a network of marine reserves, many near key bird rookeries and haul out sites, where fishing is off-limits.  More than 30 percent of traditional squid spawning / fishing grounds are closed in reserve, in addition to weekend closures.  

 

Ecosystem-based fishery management is the goal of California and federal laws governing our forage stocks.  It's also important to achieve a balance:  healthy ecosystems and sustainable fishing communities.

 

Let 'forage fish' populations double, scientists urge

Sardines, anchovies and other small, schooling fish are caught in huge numbers, but they're vulnerable to overfishing, and creatures such as salmon and tuna need them for food, the panel says.

By Tony Barboza, Los Angeles Times...Still, the U.S. West Coast is ahead of other parts of the world in how it manages some forage fish, scientists on the panel said. The sardine catch, for instance, is subject to stricter monitoring and more conservative limits that could serve as a buffer against future crashes.California's most valuable catch, squid, is also considered a forage fish but was not included in the analysis.The complete article can be viewed on Los Angeles Times.