Pacific sardines at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Photo: Adventures in Librarianship.

It’s back to school—for students, and for Pacific sardines. Pacific sardines, Sardinops sagax, were once wildly abundant along the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington. From the 1920s to through the 1940s, they supported the largest fishery in the United States—millions were caught in and around Monterey Bay. (In fact, the Monterey Bay Aquarium was once a sardine canning factory.) Though the Pacific sardine population crashed in the mid-1940s, it’s on the rise again.

While overfishing may have played a role in the population crash in the 1940s, oceanographic conditions were also very influential. The size of the Pacific sardine population fluctuates; their numbers increase when water is warm, and decrease when water is cold. This has been happening for quite some time; fish scales from sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin show that the sardines have been going through a boom-and-bust cycle for the past 1700 years.

In recent years, Pacific sardine numbers have been increasing steadily. Fishing started up again in California in the 1980s; by 2000, fisheries had been re-established off the coasts of Oregon and Washington, too. These days, Pacific sardines are doing fine. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide lists sardines as a “best choice.”

However, another schooling fish, Atlantic Herring isn’t doing quite as well. Many species of schooling fish are caught not for human consumption, but to feed poultry, livestock, and fish in the aquaculture industry. They’re processed into fishmeal and fish oil. This is a bit of a problem. Schooling fish (called clupeoid fish, for all of you aficionados) are an important part of the food web. They eat plankton, and in turn are eaten by larger predatory fish, marine mammals, and birds. Taking schooling fish out of the ocean, so they can be food for our other food, has serious repercussions for the marine food web.

Fish swim in schools to protect themselves from predators. But this strategy doesn’t really work when humans are the major predator, with our purse seines and spotting planes. Pacific sardines have recovered because of good fisheries management and favorable ocean conditions. Hopefully other fish will have a similar opportunity to go back to school.

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From left to right: Associate Producer, Joan Johnson, Sylvia Earle and Producer, Amy Miller

A turning point in her career came in 1970 when she led a team of woman Aquanauts in a two week research expedition in an underwater lab called Tektite. When the women emerged from their decompression chamber after living underwater for two weeks, the world embraced them as heroes. She was thrust into a spotlight as an ocean expert and pioneer of saturation diving and underwater research. Since then, she has continued to travel the globe and speak passionately and persuasively on ocean conservation.

We were thrilled to have a chance to meet Dr. Sylvia Earle and profile her on QUEST. Joan Johnson, the Associate Producer of the segment, was especially excited: Dr. Earle has been one of her idols since her former life as a marine biologist. Although I was also a burgeoning biologist at one point in my life, I had not heard of Dr. Earle until a couple of years ago when we featured her former husband and design partner, Graham Hawkes, in a earlier QUEST episode. We've wanted to feature her since then but she’s incredibly busy, traveling and speaking about ocean issues most of the year. In the two month window in which we wanted to film her, she was going to be on the road (in the air, under the water) no less than 50 days, with trips to Monaco, Rome, Mexico and the South Pacific.

Although I had envisioned a story where we actually get to know her, meet her family, spend time with her at her home in Oakland, cooking, playing with her dog on the beach; you know, find out what makes her "tick," I had to make due with three hours total in our KQED studio. So, Joan and I had to be VERY creative when figuring out the content of our story. Put another way, the only material that we shot of Sylvia Earle ourselves was a 2 hours interview. All the other footage in the story had to be researched, located, acquired and paid for. Thankfully, Sylvia Earle's life has been pretty well-documented in film and photography. But I know that if not for Joan's incredible resourcefulness and passion for the subject, this story would not have been possible. I had the easy part of the job: having a long conversation with an INCREDIBLE woman then writing about it. And I now have a new hero as well.

Watch the Profile: Sylvia Earle television story online.

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