March 29, 2018 — On April 8, the Pacific Fishery Management Council – a body of appointed officials that regulates fisheries off the West Coast – will be presented with the draft assessment of the sardine population from roughly southern California to Canada. The news it brings is neither good for fishermen nor the local marine ecosystem: The estimated number of sardines in July 2018 – which dictates policy for the 2018-19 fishing year – is 52,065 metric tons, an approximately 97-percent drop from 2006, the most recent peak.
The cutoff for when sardine fishing can occur is when the estimated population is at least 150,000 metric tons, which means the fishery will be closed for the fourth consecutive year.
What is in dispute: the accuracy of the population assessment, and how we got here. On one side, conservation nonprofit Oceana believes the assessment could be too high, and that sardines were pushed to this point due to overfishing when the numbers were low.
On the other side, advocates for fishermen believe there are far more sardines in the water than estimated, and that the estimates are not using the best available methods to make projections.
Currently, the method employed by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is to do months-long acoustic surveys off the coastline to measure sardine biomass.
Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, believes that method is flawed and doesn’t accurately capture the sardines close to the shore – NOAA uses large boats that can’t come in too close.
Read the full story at the Monterey County Weekly