Courtesy of MontereyHerald.com:
The federal Pacific Fishery Management Council has shut down the remainder of the current sardine season and has canceled the 2015-16 fishing season altogether. Fishermen supported this action.
Why the closure? According to environmental groups like Oceana, it was to stop overfishing and save starving sea lions deprived of essential sardines.
Neither reason is true, but many in the media have trumpeted this hyperbole put forth by groups whose political agenda is to shut down fishing completely.
The scientific facts present a different picture: the sardine population is not overfished. And sea lion mortality has not been caused by overfishing sardines.
As Dr. Ray Hilborn, professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the most respected experts on marine fishery population dynamics in the world, recently noted, “Even if there had been no fishing, the decline in California’s sardines would have been almost exactly the same.” Dr. Richard Parrish, another esteemed scientist with deep knowledge of sardines and ocean cycles, outlined how natural mortality and predation consume five times more sardines than the fishery harvests.
The truth is that the marine environment plays the major role in determining the size of the sardine stock and its effect on the ecosystem.
Dr. Kevin Hill, a fisheries scientist with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center who leads West Coast sardine stock assessments noted that, “Pacific sardines are known for wide swings in their population: the small, highly productive species multiplies quickly in good conditions and can decline sharply at other times, even in the absence of fishing. You can have the best harvest controls in the world, but you’re not going to prevent the population from declining when ocean conditions change in an unfavorable way.”
That’s why the sardine harvest control rule — developed in part by Parrish for the management plan in place since 2000 — automatically regulates the sardine fishery both by reducing the fishing quota and reducing the harvest rate as the stock declines. And it shuts down the fishery if the biomass falls below 150,000 metric tons.
The 2015 sardine population is estimated to be 97,000 metric tons, a worst-case projection, and the control rule did exactly what it was designed to do — it closed the fishery after a series of poor recruitment years.