Dr. Ellen Pikitch:

I was offering my welcome comments and thanking the committee. It is a pleasure and an honour to attend. We will discuss a group of fish that we call forage fish, small-bodied fish that we have found to have a large impact on marine ecosystems. Often, they are schooling species and tend to be high in the pelagic water column. They include species such as sardines, anchovies, krill, herring and eels. They play a unique and special role in marine ecosystems, in that they are able to feed on plankton and are in turn fed upon by many other organisms, thereby transferring energy through higher trophic levels. A simple way to think of them is as the important intermediary that helps sunlight become salmon.

Many people are not aware that a large amount of the world's wild marine fish catch consists of these small fish. A study conducted a few years ago estimated that approximately 37% of that catch consists of forage fish. This figure has grown significantly. In the 1950s, these fish represented only 8% or so of the global catch. There is every reason to forecast an increase in interest in these fish. Of the forage fish catch, approximately 90% is ground up or reduced into fish meal and fish oil. Only 10% is directly consumed by humans.

It used to be believed that these fish were so resilient, numerous and productive that nothing we could do could ever harm them. My diagram shows a wood print from the Baltic Sea in the 1550s. The fish were believed to be so abundant that, if one threw an axe into their midst, it would stand upright. We now know that it is not true that these fish are not invulnerable. In fact, they are highly sensitive and vulnerable. Indeed, there have been spectacular collapses in forage fish populations around the world. I have listed some of them. Members may be familiar with the Peruvian anchovy collapse. There have been several collapses, but the main one was in 1972. At the time, the Peruvian anchovy species represented 10% of the world's catch but it vanished overnight.

For these reasons - the large catch, the crucial role in the ecosystem, the vulnerability and the collapses - there has been more interest in getting scientific input into whether these species should be managed differently due to their crucial role. I chaired the task force that was put together. Our objective was to try to arrive at consensual recommendations on how to manage these fish in a way that recognised their important ecological role. The committee has copies of our report, Little Fish, Big Impact, which we released with an executive summary last year.

In putting together this report, the task force met over a period of several years.

This was not just a short effort. We held workshops and made site visits to areas with important forage fisheries. We did undertook a number of reviews of existing information and advice, as well as case studies, and we recognised early on that there was a bit of science that would be useful in helping to guide management recommendations. This task force was therefore unique among task forces in that much of what we did was to develop new scientific information and methodologies.

In the case studies, we examined nine different areas with interesting lessons to learn but I will speak of just one to give an example of what we tried to do with the case studies. In the Barents Sea, with which the members may be familiar, there is a threshold for capelin. Prior to this time, there were heavy catches of capelin and stock collapsed but as importantly, the cod which fed on capelin followed suit. When the capelin went down the tubes, so did the cod. People realised that if they wanted healthy cod fisheries, they needed to leave enough capelin in the water to support them. Examining past data, it was determined that 200,000 tonnes of capelin left in the Barents Sea seemed like a good number in order to have enough to serve as prey for cod. There have not been any large collapses since and the cod fishery in the Barents Sea is now the healthiest in the world, which is amazing knowing how poor some of the cod stocks are around the world. That is a good example of why a minimum threshold or amount of forage fish biomass left in the water is such a key concept emerging from the task force, and members will see that repeated in many of the analyses and recommendations.

A completely new scientific study was spearheaded by two task force members and it examined the relationship between the reproductive success of seabirds and the forage fish on which they preyed. This is a very extensive study that considered seven marine ecosystems, 14 different seabird species and, altogether, more than 400 years of observation went into it. The researchers found that breeding success of seabirds declined when the forage fish on which they depended were also reduced in abundance. They concluded that we needed to leave approximately a third of the unfished biomass of forage fish in the water just for the birds. That paper was published in the journal Science, and it came out just before the task force report.

Another piece of science is an examination of what we call ecopath models, pulling together 72 of these food web models, and I will speak briefly about them. The idea of the map is to get a global representation of ecosystems in this analysis. The documentation has an example of a simplified version of a food web model. In the middle are forage fish and yellow arrows demonstrate how much forage fish are eaten by the species of predators around the central point. A normal food web model would be much more complicated and the arrows would go in every direction indicating how all the organisms interact. In this case we are showing how important forage fish are as prey.

This model is one of the 72 that were pulled together and relates to the northern Humboldt current off the Peru coast, which is an important Peruvian anchovy fishery. What struck me right away is that seabirds are highly dependent on forage fish in this ecosystem, over 90% of their diet consists of foraged fish. Additionally, other commercially important fish, such as tuna, salmon and mahi-mahi depend on forage fish for food.

Putting all these data and models together, we found that most ecosystems have predators that are highly dependent on forage fish, and these predators take a variety of forms from the likes of commercially and recreationally important fish to seabirds such as penguins and petrels, humpback whales and other marine mammals. We also find that the more the diet of a predator depended on forage fish, the more sensitive the species to a decline in forage fish. That makes sense and one might expect to see that result but the science bore it out. This again refers to the idea of a minimum biomass threshold, leaving enough of the foraged fish in the sea to meet the needs of the predators that depend on them, and that was really brought home to the task force.

We undertook an economic analysis of the importance of foraged fish and there are a number of unique aspects in this respect. Typically, when people speak about how important is a fish species economically, they examine the value of fish coming out the ocean and the landed or ex-vessel value. What is often ignored is the supportive value that these fish play by the fact that other commercially important fish feed upon forage fish, and when caught they also have a value. Some percentage of the fish value must be due to their feeding on the forage fish. We did a broad analysis, considering not only the value of forage fish but the value they contribute to the catches of other commercially important species globally. We have termed this the supportive value. We had no idea what the numbers would show and were quite surprised at the result.

The direct value of forage fish - the fish taken from the sea and get paid for immediately - is $5.6 billion per year globally, but the supportive value is twice as high at approximately $11 billion per year. Adding the components we are talking about a commercial fisheries production value of nearly $17 billion per year globally. These fish are worth twice as much left in the water as they are when taken in a net. This is the first time an analysis like this has been done and we will see more analyses like this as we start broadening our thinking about fisheries and not just looking at the value of taking things out of the water. We should consider the complete value. This economic value only takes into account the commercial fishing sector because that was the easiest route for us to take. It was important for us to do that work and we would be comparing "apples with apples". Nevertheless, a similar analysis could and should be done on the supportive role of these fish for recreational fisheries and eco-tourism activities, such as people who go to Antarctica to see penguins or whale watching. People can only partake in those activities because the forage fish are in the water to support those predators. What we have produced is a minimal estimate of the economic value of these forage fish.

We also did some more complex mathematics and although I will not go into detail, we compared two harvest strategies. One is a standard and quite similar to the Common Fisheries Policy that this country has just adopted for fish in general.

It is to set a fishing mortality rate equal to FMSY or the fishing mortality rate that would result in the maximum sustained yield of the target fish species. In our analysis we compared what happens if one fishes forage fish at this MSY conventional level with what happens if one fishes at a more precautionary level, fishing at only half of the FMSY value. There were also differences in how many fish were left in the sea at a minimum. By that we mean that if for any reason the fish population dropped below that level, fishing would cease. In the conventional scenario we said fishing would stop only when the population reached 20% of its unfished level and in the precautionary scenario we doubled that and said that if the population reached 40% of its unfished level, fishing would stop.

We are just comparing two different fishing strategies to see what happens. We are looking at what happens in three very different respects. The graph on the left shows what happened to the predators. With the conventional strategy, even though one might be getting close to maximum sustained yield of the target species, one is losing a fair percentage of the predators. The median loss was close to 30% for the conventional strategy. With the precautionary strategy, we still lost some predators and had some declines, but it was far less at closer to approximately 10% declines. One of the more interesting results was the middle result, the probability that the forage fish population would collapse. Using a conventional fishing strategy, there is a large percentage of the times that the population of the forage fish collapses. This is because these fish are very short lived and if anything goes wrong in one year or in a couple of years in a row, one will see a collapse. They tend to be vulnerable to collapse so when one fishes them near the limit of what they can withstand, they are much more likely to collapse than if one held back a little and fished them at a lower rate. In the precautionary scenario the probability of collapse was much reduced.

Finally, I will look at the yield or the biomass catch of forage fish. In the 100% or FMSY scenario we did not see a catch of the MSY and part of that is because of the frequency of collapses. When there is a collapse one is obviously not getting anything like what one could be getting. We had more catch in the conventional scenario of the target species, but not quite as much more as one might expect.

To conclude, what we recommended is that when looking at forage fish one should take a good look at the predators that depend on them. Take a good look not just at the sea birds and the marine mammals but also look carefully at the recreationally important and commercially important fish and be prepared to try to make room in the ocean for enough prey to feed these other important segments of the ecosystem. I did not have time to go into this a great deal but because forage fish and their predators tend to have a lot of alignment in space and time, we need to look at spatial and temporal management as something that would complement the quantitative measures. Overall, we recommended that forage fish catches should be cut in half relative to traditional fisheries management advice and that the amount of these fish left in the water should be double what is typically recommended. Not every situation is equivalent. There are many differences, so the management must be tailored to available information and to particular places.

With regard to the report, "Little Fish, Big Impact", and the task force that produced it, what we have done is to take a step towards ecosystem based management and to show how it can be done. If our advice is taken, there will be more benefits than the opposite. The benefits come in many different forms. One benefit is having ecosystems that are able to provide their traditional services and that maintain the integrity and support services of those ecosystems. In terms of the target fisheries for forage fish, because there will be far fewer collapses if this advice were taken, one would tend to see a much more stable and robust industry that would pursue these forage fish. It could be very good for the industry to have stability, predictability in the catches over time and not to have to deal with boom and bust cycles. Due to the important supportive role forage fish play in providing the food of other commercially valuable fish, such as cod, tuna and salmon, we would expect to see an increase in the value of these other commercially important fish on foot of taking on this advice for the forage fish.

I draw the committee's attention to how we have set up our recommendations. There is a big table in the executive summary which tries to spell out how one would be able to tailor the management based on how much is known about a particular situation. The idea here was to provide incentives for more knowledge. This is a strategy that makes sense. The more one knows, the more one can do and the risks one takes will not be as great when one is equipped with greater knowledge. We came up with what we call a three tiered precautionary approach to the management of forage fish. Basically, we recommend that if one does not know very much, one should not take many fish out of the water. If one knows a lot, not just about the target species but also about the ecosystem it inhabits and the inter-relationships within that ecosystem, one can take a more aggressive fishing policy.

That concludes the presentation. I will be happy to take questions.