Pacific Sardine

What a forage fish is

Sardines, anchovies, herring and smelt are forage fish: small, oily, schooling fish that eat plankton and are eaten by nearly everything else. Sea lions, dolphins, humpback whales, tuna, salmon, sharks, brown pelicans and cormorants all depend on them. A healthy forage fish population is the difference between a coast that is alive and one that is quiet.

Why sardines form bait balls

A school of sardines spread across the water is hard for a predator to pick from. When dolphins, sea lions or tuna press the school from below and the side, the fish pack into a tight, spinning sphere, each one trying to get to the middle. From inside the water a bait ball sounds like a hiss as thousands of bodies change direction at once. Predators then take turns slicing through it, and birds drop in from above. It is one of the great spectacles of the ocean, and the subject of one of our prints.

Boom, bust and the fishery

The Pacific sardine population swings enormously with ocean temperature, booming in warm decades and collapsing in cool ones, or when fishing takes too much at the wrong time. The most famous collapse came in the 1940s and 1950s, when Monterey's Cannery Row fell silent. The stock recovered in the 1980s and 1990s, then fell again in the 2010s.

Because the stock dropped below the limit set in the fishery's rules, the Pacific Fishery Management Council closed the directed commercial sardine fishery in 2015, and it has stayed closed every year since, with only small incidental and live-bait allowances. Scientists continue to debate how much of the latest decline is climate and how much is fishing; the honest answer is both.