Last week the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in California moved one step closer to living up to its moniker as a haven for marine life. On Thursday the Sanctuary’s Advisory Council voted to adopt a resolution recognizing the important role of forage species in the Sanctuary, where rich feeding grounds support among the highest concentrations of wildlife in the Pacific, including millions of seabirds and sea ducks.

Photo of humpback whale and seabirds feeding on anchovy in Morro Bay, CA  by William Bouton

In the past year, Audubon and other members of the Conservation Working Group – a formal advisory body to the Council- built support among Council members for Sanctuary engagement in forage species protection. The new resolution provides a foundation for engagement by the Sanctuary in future opportunities to protect the region’s forage base, and supports recent commitments from state and federal fisheries managers to improve forage species management.

Audubon California Executive Director Michael Sutton remarks, “We commend the Council for adopting this resolution reflecting a recognition of the importance of forage species to sustain a healthy, diverse ocean food web for the fish and wildlife of the Sanctuary.”

Forage species such as sardine, squid and smelt are the foundation of the food web on the west coast and support a diverse array of predators including seabirds, marine mammals, turtles, and large fish. When the 6000-square-mile Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary was established in 1992, scientists knew the region was important to wildlife, but recent studies tracking the movement of the predators has revealed the region’s incredible global importance to Pacific predators.

While the Sanctuaries Program, a division of NOAA, has no authority to regulate fishing activity within its waters, the overall program and individual Sanctuaries may provide information and recommendations to fisheries managers. This influence proved especially important in recent years when the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary recommended that fisheries managers ban the harvest of krill from the Sanctuary. Managers responded by creating a permanent ban on harvest of krill in all federal waters in Washington, Oregon and California. This monumental yet under-recognized regulation forever protects the only food of blue whales, and the foundation of the entire west coast marine food chain.

The new resolution is important because forage species are in trouble. Sardines are in decline, anchovies are unassessed and have been rare in recent years, and herring stocks are stressed and constricting. These species and others that are not yet fished are critical for sooty shearwater, black-footed albatross, common murre, marbled murrelet, ashy storm-petrel and at least 80 other breeding and visiting seabirds and sea ducks. At the same time, the global demand for fishmeal products is increasing, and the remaining unmanaged species could be subject to new industrial fisheries, putting seabirds and other predators at risk. The threat is real- in California, squid is now the most lucrative commercial fishery, followed closely by sardine.