March 28, 2019 — Sardine fishermen in Monterey Bay are facing a fifth straight year of restrictions on the amount they will be permitted to catch, creating financial hardships for the commercial industry.
A new draft assessment from the National Marine Fisheries Service indicates a sardine population of 27,547 metric tons. According to the Fisheries Service, any tonnage below 50,000 metric tons is considered “overfished.” That’s a 98.5 percent collapse since 2006.
The restriction, which would essentially cancel the 2019-2020 commercial sardine season, must be applied when populations drop under 150,000 metric tons, said Geoff Shester, senior scientist with the Monterey office of Oceana, a marine environmental watchdog group.
“The crash of Pacific sardines has been difficult to watch,” Shester said. “We’ve witnessed dramatic starvation effects to ocean animals.”
The collapse is a result of overfishing, Shester said. Sardine populations go through natural cyclical fluctuations, but to see numbers this low is caused from over-fishing.
Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, was not available to comment Wednesday, but she told the Monterey Herald following the 2018 assessment that “fishermen are seeing more sardines, not less, especially in nearshore waters.”