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Place 02 · Monterey Bay · Chapter 7 of 7
When the Sardines Left
In the 1940s Monterey called itself the Sardine Capital of the World; ten years later the sardines were gone, and so was the money.
About 15 minutes · 1 video · 1 live cam · 2 quick activities
Start here
A street built on one small fish
Pacific sardines are hand-length fish that eat plankton and travel in schools of millions, and in the 1930s and 1940s Monterey caught them by the boatload. Cannery Row was a street of canneries and reduction plants that packed them into tins and ground the rest into fishmeal and oil. Then, just after World War II, the catch fell off a cliff.
Watch this
See it move
TED-Ed — Will the ocean ever run out of fish? Monterey was not the first place to learn this the hard way, and it was not the last.
While you watch, look for
- How fishing changed once boats, nets and engines got industrial
- At least one fix that lets a fished population recover
- Something you did not expect. Hold onto it.
The short version
Three things going on here
The boom
Sardine Capital of the World
At the peak, Monterey’s purse-seine boats landed well over a hundred thousand tons of sardines a season, and most of it became fishmeal, fertilizer and oil rather than dinner. John Steinbeck made the street famous in his 1945 novel Cannery Row, written while the fish were still pouring in.
The bust
Two blows at once
Boats took a huge share of the adults every year, just as the Pacific slid into a cooler phase that sardines breed poorly in. Mud cores from off Southern California show sardines booming and crashing for centuries before anyone owned a net, so the ocean sets the swings and heavy fishing makes the crash deeper and longer.
The math
Half full grows fastest
A fish population grows slowly when it is tiny, slowly when it is crowded near its carrying capacity, and fastest in between, at about half full. Catch only that extra growth each year and you have the maximum sustainable yield; catch more, and the population shrinks every year you keep doing it.
Photos: Pok Rie, frank minjarez, Francisco Davids / Pexels
Play with it
Watch the open ocean right now
This is a live camera in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Open Sea exhibit, at the aquarium that stands where Cannery Row’s last cannery used to be. Watch for a few minutes: look for small fish schooling tight and the big predators cruising around them.
Live cam: Monterey Bay Aquarium, via YouTube. If the stream is resting, come back during the aquarium’s daytime hours (Pacific time).
Two questions to answer while you are in there
- Count the kinds of big predators you see. Many of them eat small schooling fish like sardines. What happens to them when the sardines crash?
- Why would a tight school protect a sardine from a tuna, but make it easier to catch with a net?
Try it yourself
Check yourself
Try it
The Sardine Story, In Order
Pick the true statement in each set, and the whole boom and bust tells itself.
Try it · interactive
Sardine Harvest
Run a sardine fishery for 30 years: choose the yearly catch and see whether the population holds steady, hits maximum sustainable yield, or collapses, then switch on a string of bad ocean years.
Open the Sardine Harvest in its own window (opens in a new tab).
Words you will hear
Four terms, that is all
Carrying capacity
Most individuals an environment can support
Logistic growth
Slow, then fast, then leveling off
Maximum sustainable yield
Biggest catch a population can replace yearly
Overfishing
Catching fish faster than they reproduce
Check your understanding
Practice the whole chapter
Everything in this chapter, in eight quick questions. Retry as often as you like. Read the feedback on every answer, right or wrong, because that is where the learning is.
Practice
Practice: When the Sardines Left
Eight questions covering the video, the three cards, the four terms and the interactive above.
If you want more
Go deeper
- Oceanography 101 (MiraCosta) 14.16 — Carrying Capacity in Marine Communities — LibreTexts · 5 minutes
- Oceanography 101 (MiraCosta) 17.6 — Biological Resources — LibreTexts · fishing and overfishing · 10 minutes
- NOAA Fisheries — Pacific Sardine — Where the sardines stand today · 5 minutes
Photo credits (Pexels): adiprayogo liemena, Daniel Cantwell, Pok Rie, frank minjarez, Francisco Davids.