When little fish thrive, the results can be spectacular.
Last fall, I found myself on a whale watching tour of the waters around New York City. The trip, which employed guides from Gotham Whale and was hosted by the storied nonprofit Riverkeeper, could be seen as a kind of victory lap for the clean water org. After half a century of advocacy—a period that saw the watchdog group win David vs. Goliath legal battles against giants such as—the Hudson River and nearby waters are cleaner than they’ve been in the memory of anyone alive today.
Menhaden are, Jackman announced, “the most important fish in the sea. They’re the linchpin that converts phytoplankton into a biomass that brings striped bass, bluefish, porpoises, tuna, and whales around.” But these hulking creatures were rapidly being overfished. Wild Oceans pushed for tournaments to adopt catch and release policies and worked to establish more stringent fishing regulations. An early high point was developing language that was used in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, a 1976 law that established the federal government’s authority to manage and regulate fishing in the first place.
The Atlantic coast of the United States is not the only place where people are starting to look more closely at bait. Around the world, similar stories have underscored the importance of small forage fish, although for the most part, the stories begin with populations going in the other direction. Overfishing of herring, anchovies, sardines, and other small fish has led to population collapses not just of the fish themselves but of the other animals that depend on them.
“That turns out,” Essington said, “to be devilishly hard to figure out. Reasonable minds can look at the same data and really disagree.” “Today, if one is tasked with putting together a more robust management plan for a sardine or an anchovy or a herring,” Essington told me, “you need to at least think through: What are the really dependent predators, and how is the successful application of this harvest plan going to potentially risk those things?”
“It killed 80 percent of all the animals in my study site,” she said. “That included all the fur seals, all the sea lions, all the penguins, and all the guano birds, which are, like, millions of birds. The colony where I worked, which was the most amazing, abundant place, was almost empty after this big El Niño.”
In addition to turning impressive swaths of the Pacific Ocean off South America into wildlife preserves, which give marine animals of all sizes a safe place to hide, Majluf has taken on a somewhat quixotic quest to replace as much of Peru’s reduction fishery as possible with a more sustainable food fishery, elevating the standing of small fish along the way. It has put her up against not only the enormous anchoveta industry but the tastes and eating habits of everyday Peruvians.
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