SARDINE RESEARCH UPDATE
California’s wetfish industry has long supported collaborative field research, stemming from industry’s cooperation from the beginning of the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) in the 1940s. Since its inception in 2004, CWPA has followed that tradition.
In the early 2000s, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biomass surveys of Pacific Sardine did not run inshore of the approximate 40 meters (m) depth limit of those large research vessels. Thus, NOAA stock assessments, the basis of fishery management harvest limits, did not account for the nearshore biomass of sardine and other coastal pelagic species (CPS,) including sardines and anchovy. This omission has been problematic in California, especially during periods of low stock abundance, when CPS stocks tend to concentrate in the nearshore area, and where more than 70 percent of sardine and other CPS landings typically occur.
The industry-sponsored aerial survey highlighted on the Sardine Research page was part of our early efforts to address this problem. Beginning in 2012, a period of estimated declining sardine biomass, CWPA joined forces with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to collaborate on nearshore aerial surveys off the California coast, conducted in the Department’s plane with a commercial spotter pilot contracted by CWPA as observer. The objective was to photo-document and estimate nearshore (<40 m depth) sardine and anchovy biomass, to improve the science underpinning stock assessments.
The second EFP, approved beginning in 2021, allowed fishermen with EFP permits to target sardines for biological sampling, including age, because the stock assessment model had not included fishery age data since the directed fishery was closed in 2015, and was not accounting for recruitment that California fishermen were reporting on the fishing grounds.
CWPA has also received Exempted Fishing Permits (EFPs) in support of our sardine research efforts.
EFPs were needed in order to target sardines after the northern sardine stock biomass fell below an estimated 150,000 mt in 2015, and the directed fishery was required to close.
Our first EFP authorized fishermen to catch sardine schools identified by the pilot, to validate spotter pilot estimates of school size and species composition in CDFW’s aerial surveys.
Fishermen’s EFP sardine catches are restricted in order to spread the 520 mt total allowed catch across the full year. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife meets all EFP vessels at the dock and samples every load, weighing and measuring the sample fish and aging some of them.
Read the BIOLOGICAL DATA COLLECTED FROM DIRECTED FISHING EFP in 2022.
Beginning in 2021, CWPA’s sardine field research efforts expanded to include a collaboration with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center to conduct nearshore acoustic surveys. Funded in part by a contract with SWFSC, and with a sophisticated acoustic array borrowed from the Center, CWPA chartered a purse seine vessel to run transects every 5 miles along the mainland coast, extending out about 5 miles each, from Bodega Bay to San Diego, and including Santa Cruz and Catalina Islands in the Channel Islands. The 2022 survey extended for 30 days. Half of the days were covered by SWFSC contract, and the other 15 days were paid for by California sardine disaster relief funds awarded by Congress and the U.S. Commerce Department, that California’s wetfish industry had earmarked for research.
Figure F2. Long Beach Carnage’s nearshore transects (magenta lines) and compulsory, adaptive, and unmanned surface vehicle (USV) transects (gray lines). …. All vessels will run the transects as close to shore as safely navigable.
Please visit the Acoustic Survey page to learn more about California nearshore surveys.
Please also visit the SK Grant – Sardine Dynamics page to read more about CWPA’s recent sardine research.
Please visit the Aerial Survey page to read more about this collaborative research and its benefits.