A. It has been an exceptionally good year for whale watching in California. In pastseasons, sightseers off Monterey typically spotted two or three humpbacks (座头鲸 )on a single hftemoon at sea. This past September, October, November, and December,whale watchers was treated to more than 50 at a time. Dozens of killer whales playedin the same area throughout the fall. In December, a total of 364 gray whales werecounted migrating south past Palos Verdes--double the t 82 spotted there in December2012.
B. California has witnessed a genuine explosion of sea life over the past six months, andwhales aren't the only ones making waves. Environmental scientists said in Decemberthat they were seeing "unprecedented" numbers of brown pelicans ( 鹈鹕 ) in theSan Francisco Bay Area. It's been "a months-long carnival of humpback whales, birdclouds, dolphin wizardry, frenzied sea lions, playful killer whales and even visits frommarine royalty--blue whales," wrote the Santa Cruz Sentinel. To borrow a line fromMelville: Surely all this is not without meaning.
C.And meaning there is in this tale of Pacific ecology and American history. Theincreased activity of marine megafauna (句型动物 ) is being attributed to ananchovy ( 凤尾鱼 ) boom: The tiny fish have crowded the coast, densely packed,sparking an ongoing feeding frenzy. The flip side of the great anchovy upwelling,though, is the great sardine crash of 2013, which scientists expect to reboundthroughout the ecosystem for decades to come. Cetaceans ( 鲸目动物) , sea lions,and pelicans in Monterey may be feasting on anchovies now, but they'll eventuallybe hurt by sardine scarcity, according to some biologists. An epidemic of sick sea lionpups in Southern California is already being blamed on the decline of sardines.
D.The last time Pacific sardines declined this steeply was around 1950, shortly afterJohn Steinbeck so exquisitely captured the prime of the sardine canning industry inhis novel Cannery Row.
E.Atlantic editor Corby Kummer described the fishery's ups and downs, and itssignificance, in a 2007 article titled "The Rise of the Sardine." In the decades beforeSteinbeck wrote his novel, the sardine industry was feeding millions of soldiers inboth world wars and sustaining thousands of foreign-born workers--the canners andfishermen of Cannery Row--during the Great Depression. But the largest fisheryin the Western hemisphere began to mysteriously decline even while it was beingimmortalized in literature. By the mid-1950s, it had collapsed entirely.
F. The canneries shut down and Monterey started losing its smell. From 1967 to 1986there were severe restrictions on sardine fishing, and Cannery Row "turned into SkidRow," in Kummer's words. Then it went to the tourists: an abandoned cannery wastransformed into the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a bronze bust of Steinbeck went up afew blocks away; now "Historic Cannery Row is Monterey's premiere destination forgreat hotels, shopping, dining, family fun and nightlife."
G.The sardines came back after a couple of decades, and the stock climbed steadily intothe new millennium--hence Kummer's argument, in 2007, that sardines were readyfor a culinary revival. But now the population has crashed again.
H.In the 1950s, the collapse of the sardine industry was blamed on overfishing. It'stempting to blame the current decline on global warming. Neither of those factorsdeserves single-handed responsibility, though. Oceanographers have known for alittle while, now, that there's a natural ocean cycle--though, a long one that's notfully understood--that governs the rise and fall of sardine and anchovy stocks in thePacific.
I.In 2003, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)combed through decades of data on physical oceanography, marine biology, andmeteorology in the Pacific Ocean in search of long-term cycles governing sardineand anchovy populations. They concluded that sardine and anchovy stocks fluctuateaccording to a roughly 50-year "boom-and-bust" cycle. "A naturally occurring climatepattern that works its way across the Pacific," also known as the Pacific DecadalOscillation, brings warmer temperatures to the California coast approximately every25 years, prompting a switch-off between anchovies and sardines.
J.In 2013, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University ofCalifornia-San Diego even went deep into this cycle. Using data derived from variousmodels and simulations--including a previous study that reconstructed thousandsof years of sardine and anchovy population trends based on sedimentary seafloordeposits--they came up with what they believed to be an accurate reproductionof sardine-anchovy fluctuations from 1661 to 2013. This model "showed that thesardine and anchovy fluctuations were not controlled solely by climate, as had beenpreviously suggested," according to a write-up on Scripps's Explorations Now site.The Scripps researchers gave more weight to the role of overfishing in sardine stocksthan the MBARI researchers did in 2003.
K.Both studies underscore the complexity of predicting the rise and fall of global fishpopulations. George Sugihara, another biologist at Scripps, thinks that all simulationsfisheries scientists use to predict populations and set quotas are "fundamentallyflawed." These models don't reflect the "dynamic complexity" of the ocean, and can'taccount for how a population's growth rate might vary in response to, for example,overfishing of another species or introductions of invasive species. His point isreinforced by a recent study, published in December 2013 in Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences, highlighting the "snowball effect" of overfishing andconfirming what many have always known about the interconnectedness of differentspecies.
L.In an excellent piece of reporting for the Monterey County Weekly, David Schmalzinterviewed representatives from various ocean conservation and fisheriesmanagement organizations about their conflicting opinions regarding the future ofsardines. NOAA uses a specific formula to project the sardine population and setcatch limits each year—a formula that the non-profit advocacy group Oceana wantsto change, arguing that it's not restrictive enough. Some commercial fishermen inCalifornia, of course, think the formula is already too restrictive.
M. "When people think of sardines they think of Cannery Row, Steinbeck, theAquarium," wrote Schmalz. "When people think of anchovies, they think of pizzathat disgusts them." It may be time to let sardines go, a second time, and come toterms with anchovies, he suggests.
The last time sardines said "see you later" was a bitter goodbye. This time it isn't, inpart because of the lessons we learned when they all but disappeared. One of thoselessons is simple: Do not rely on sardines for a paycheck, because they will abandonyou.
O. Another lesson: recovery. That the Monterey area was able to reinvent itself andbecome a world-class tourist destination in a matter of a decade is an incrediblefeat. All around the U.S., there are cities in decline that have been abandoned by theindustries that supported them. Monterey, years ago, was one of those cities, and thepeople that stayed on responded like prizefighters, establishing a sustainable industry(tourism) that will carry on for generations.
P. But the most important lesson their disappearance taught us--and one we arecertainly still leaming--is respect for the sea, and the balance of its ecosystems.When the fishery began, and truly thrived, there were so many fish in the sea it washard for anyone to imagine they could be exhausted.