Informational website devoted to the Oregon sardine fishery and sardine seafood product development

Pacific Sardine Fishery Background

Pacific sardines ( Sardinops sagax ) have made a strong biological comeback over the past decade. During the 1930s, Pacific sardines were the largest volume fisheries in the U.S. with catches off the central California coast often over 200,000 metric tons (mt) or more (Ueber and McCall 1992). The fishery extended to northern extremes of the California current and into Canada and there was an active sardine fishery in Oregon from 1935-1940. There was a collapse of the Pacific sardine fishery in the late 1940s which many attributed to overfishing. However, recent evidence has shown that small pelagics such as sardines and anchovies show multidecadal fluctuations and are sensitive to long-scale ocean-atmospheric climate changes known as regime shifts (Lluch-Belda et al. 1992; Matsuura 1999; Emmett and Brodeur 2000; Chavez et al. 2003). Baumgartner et al. (1999) has traced natural fluctuation of Pacific sardines and anchovies off the California coast over a 1500 year time frame through sediment scale analyses. The fisheries has recovered sufficiently to allow for significant harvest levels of sardines since 1999. Several researchers feel that the sardine biomass will be stable for at least ten years (Gauvin 2001). Some West Coast seafood companies have made significant capital investments in refurbishing plants and purchasing new refrigeration systems for producing frozen sardines (McCrae 2001). Read More