The Sardine-Anchovy Puzzle
Sardine (Sardinops spp.) and anchovy (Engraulis spp.) populations around the world have exhibited extreme fluctuations, often varying a thousandfold in abundance from one decade to the next, accompanied by economic boom-and-bust cycles that have become le
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The Sardine-Anchovy Puzzle Alec D. MacCall
Sardine (Sardinops spp.) and anchovy (Engraulis spp.) populations around the world have exhibited extreme fluctuations, often varying a thousandfold in abundance from one decade to the next, accompanied by economic boom-and-bust cycles that have become legendary. In nearly every case, fortunes are made during times of abundance, not only by the fishing and processing industries, but also by secondary industries such as poultry ranching and fish rearing—industries made possible by convenient large quantities of inexpensive, high-protein animal food. Yet the prosperity typically lasts for little more than a decade, and suddenly the fish stocks mysteriously disappear. In some cases, alternative fisheries are eventually developed. However, in nearly every instance of stock collapse, the social and economic damage is severe. Once prosperous fishing communities become ghost towns: processing plants are boarded up, equipment is sold, and large fleets of fishing vessels slowly rust away. In response to this puzzle, biologists and oceanographers have conducted major research programs off California, Peru and Chile, Japan, and South Africa, but the answer has been remarkably elusive. Much of the work has been done in the California Current, the site of perhaps the largest, and certainly the longest, fishery-oceanographic research program ever undertaken. J.B.C. Jackson (eds.), Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-029-3_4, © Island Press 2011
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Historical Review During the 1930s and 1940s, the Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax caerulea) supported one of the largest fisheries in the world, with annual catches exceeding 600,000 metric tons (mt) and fishing fleets active from Mexico to Canada. The collapse of this fishery in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a landmark event in fishery science and biological oceanography. Although a few other major world fisheries had disappeared previously, loss of the sardine fishery was one of the first to be viewed as a subject for large-scale scientific investigation, in this case centering on the debate as to whether the decline of the resource was due to overfishing or to natural causes, and consequently, what if anything could be done to rebuild the fishery. At the end of the 1940s, the resource was clearly in decline, and the industry was threatened by restrictive fishing regulations being proposed by California’s Department of Fish and Game (CDFG). In response to this threat, the fishing industry underwrote the creation of an ambitious multiagency scientific program, the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), a program that continues to the present day. Its members included Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), the federal government’s Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the CDFG, among others. The program was originally funded by the fishing industry through a selfimposed tax on fish landings and was overseen b
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