The Sardine Run

A bait ball of sardines turning as one beneath the surface off Baja California. When predators press a school from below, the fish pack into a sphere that moves like a single animal, splitting and reforming in seconds.

From inside the water a bait ball is sound as much as sight: a hiss of thousands of bodies changing direction at once. The photograph freezes one of those turns, with the surface breaking into light above it.

The most graphic of the eight prints. It works as an abstract from across a room and as a crowd of individual fish up close.

Sardines are forage fish: the small, oily schooling fish that feed almost everything bigger, from sea lions and pelicans to tuna and whales. When sardines are scarce, the whole coast goes hungry.

The Pacific sardine population off the West Coast has collapsed before, in the 1940s and again in the 2010s. The United States closed its directed sardine fishery in 2015 because the stock had fallen too low, and it has stayed closed since. Ocean warming and fishing both play a part.

A bait ball is what a healthy ocean looks like from the inside. Our citizen science crews record forage fish, birds and predators together, because the numbers only make sense as a system.

Read about Citizen Science and our guide to ocean conservation in Southern California. Species guide: Pacific Sardine.

• HD Metal · Printed onto white gloss aluminum, luminous and sharp; ships boxed, ready to hang. From $245.
• HD Acrylic · Printed behind crystal-clear acrylic for depth and color that glows; ships boxed, ready to hang. From $295.
• Fine Art Paper · Archival fine art paper, ships rolled in a tube for your own frame. From $145.
• Sizes · 12 × 18, 16 × 24, 20 × 30, 24 × 36 inches. Printed to order in the USA and shipped insured within the US.
• Where the money goes · a print is a purchase, not a donation, so there is no tax receipt. My Clean Ocean keeps the profit for its youth programs.