Ocean Sanctuaries Are a Boon for Fish, Seabirds, and Marine Mammals

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