Ocean Sanctuaries Are a Boon for Fish, Seabirds, and Marine Mammals
A chain of more than 100 Marine Protected Areas offer a safe haven for creatures from albatrosses to whales along California's 1,100-mile coastline.
This story is running in the July-August 2012 issue as "Life Insurance." The online version has been changed to reflect that on June 6, 2012, the California Fish and Game Commission approved and adopted regulations for the North Coast, putting in place a chain of more than 100 marine protected areas extending from Oregon to Mexico.
In the mid-1970s, when salmon stocks were plentiful along California’s north coast, boats packed tightly into harbors during the summer fishing season. Lights from the swaying vessels reflected off the water and lit up dark, foggy bays, transforming the sleepy coastal towns of Mendocino, Elk, and Albion into the likenesses of Saint-Tropez, recalls Dave Jensen, a commercial salmon fisherman in his twenties at the time. Fishermen slept on their boats and glided through the narrow channels of the harbors in the early morning darkness.
“You rolled out of the sleeping bag and fired up the engines in the dark, heading out with every expectation of catching a lot of fish,” says Jensen. “It was still kind of a gold rush mentality in that you got up early and you were prepared to put in a long, hard day with every promise of it being profitable. What you didn’t know was whether you were working for five cents an hour or $15. But it was an incredibly exciting lifestyle.”
Even in the heyday, an end to the prosperity lurked on the horizon. Enormous floating canneries—factory ships that could scoop up fish by the ton—made local fishermen nervous. “That was a whole different game than we were playing,” says Jensen. By the early 1980s the salmon catch was on a slow but steady decline.
When it bottomed out Jensen tried his hand as a commercial diver doing underwater construction, ran a dive shop, and caught sea urchins. But in his thirties, tired of the boom-and-bust cycle, he went to graduate school. He studied entomology and the effects of pollutants on aquatic organisms, which led to a position as a “toxi-cop” enforcement officer at the California Environmental Protection Agency. “So I was on the other side,” says Jensen, now a burly, bearded 62-year-old with an intense gaze and a deep laugh who is prone to an almost evangelical intonation in his storytelling. “Throughout my life I’ve straddled that fence repeatedly.” The conservation ethic was always a part of his mindset, even during his time as a fisherman, when his lifelong devotion to seabirds began. Though fishermen aim to get the best catch they can and sell it at the highest profit, says Jensen, “they are at heart conservationists, because there has to be a tomorrow.”
Ocean sanctuaries, seabirds and forage fish
Editor:
The topic of "forage fish" is a hot one, what with Oceana suing the National Marine Fisheries Service over their management of such organisms and the recent major study funded by Lenfest Foundation. The importance of the topic comes out in the article by Amanda Mascarelli "Life Insurance" (July-August 2012), which provides details on the marine reserves being established along the California Coast through the Marine Life Protection
Act (MLPA). This is cutting edge stuff, the US actually leads the way in the establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) that actually are marine reserves as well, e.g. the vast Papahanaumokuakea and the Remote Pacific Islands national monuments recently designated. Most of the MPAs that get announced these days allow full-scale fishing, but the growing wisdom in fisheries management has evolved to include no-take MPAs as
necessary tools in providing sustainable catches. That being said, the Life Insurance article includes some important mis-representations. Forage fish are defined as those species that are prey to seabirds, mammals and large fish throughout their entire life cycles: they are bite sized, essentially, and abundant. The California Current is somewhat unique among
similar systems in that the juveniles of rockfish were once the food web currency on which top predators, including salmon, survived and not so much the typical forage species of eastern boundary currents: anchovies, sardines etc. However, an initial miscalculation on the part of fishery managers, in which by virtue of their incredible abundance it was deemed
that rockfish had a forage fish rate-of-recruitment (turnover in a few years) when, as it later was learned (too late, rockfish fisheries now closed), they actually matured late, grew slowly and owing to episodic reproduction needed to live upwards of 100 years for their stocks to
persist. They produced their abundant young, perhaps to be eaten (!), somewhat similar to Atlantic cod (now also gone). The article does touch on this --- the large, most fecund rockfish need to return --- but it should be emphasized that these MLPA reserves, while critical to rockfish recovery, benefitting both human and natural predators alike as well as
the ecosystem, will do little for the highly mobile "forage fish" like sardines, anchovies and krill. A school of anchovies can move through one of these MLPA reserves in a matter of hours. Moreover, the article repeatedly and specifically mentions sardines as important to coastal seabirds (e.g. caption to opening image) when in fact the sardines that occur in coastal waters are larger than most of the seabirds. Certainly a pelican can down an adult sardine but in no way are these fish important to murres, murrelets or cormorants as the article claims. To find small sardines one must travel to the outer reaches of the California Current where the species spawns, often more than one hundred miles from shore, and where these bird species and many mammals are absent (maybe the sardines "know" this, evolutionarily speaking). In the quest for better ecosystem based management, something that the Audubon Society champions, it is important that we have our facts right before we present our arguments in favor of spatial protection of marine resources.
David Ainley
Sausalito, California