Forage fish -- small schooling fishes such as sardines, anchovies, and menhaden -- are among the most ecologically and commercially important species in the marine environment. These naturally abundant fish serve as food for marine mammals, seabirds, and larger fish, and some act as filter feeders that maintain water quality and prevent destructive algal blooms. Forage fish are also highly valued by humans for many purposes: as food for people, as fish oil for popular Omega 3 dietary supplements, as bait in commercial fishing operations, and as feed for livestock and aquaculture.

In recent years, industrial forage fisheries have become highly sophisticated, and have greatly increased their capacity to catch these important prey species in larger numbers. A concomitant rise in market demand has led to extremely high catches of forage fish, which has reduced their availability to populations of larger fish, seabirds and marine mammals that depend on them for food. It is therefore necessary to develop smarter management approaches for forage fish that will not only ensure this resource is harvested sustainably but that also achieve a better balance between the needs of humans and the integrity of marine ecosystems. With support from the Lenfest Ocean Program, the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University launched the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, assembling a team of highly respected international scientists to comprehensively examine the management of forage fish populations and develop practical, science-based recommendations for policy makers and fisheries managers to follow. The plans, to be completed toward the end of 2010, will serve as a roadmap to achieving long-term sustainability and will embrace a holistic approach known as “ecosystem-based fisheries management,” or EBFM.

Over the past decade, scientists have increasingly called for use of ecosystem-based fisheries management. Rather than manage each fish species in isolation – usually, by determining the maximum sustainable catch for that species -- EBFM also considers how the catch is affected by or affects other ecosystem components. These include considering how catching one species may impact ocean habitats or other species taken incidentally (i.e. bycatch prevalence), as well as how the predators and prey of the target species will be affected, The interconnected nature of marine populations requires that fisheries be managed from this broader perspective. Forage fish are very nearly at the base of the food web in many marine ecosystems, and an EBFM approach for them is especially important because it will help protect the entire system from collapse.

Because of forage fishes’ unique role in food webs, EBFM for these fish will likely require a more nuanced understanding of food web dynamics. Forage fish are often involved in very complex food webs that are fundamentally unlike the terrestrial food webs that we are used to managing. For example, adult forage fish are filter feeders that eat the larvae of the larger fish that are their predators. Thus, explosive growth in forage fish due to predator removal can actually suppress predator recovery. Incorporating these unconventional and unpredictable predator-prey dynamics into forage fishery stock assessment and management will be an integral part of moving toward and implementing an EBFM approach.

The Institute for Ocean Conservation Science will convene four meetings of the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force in 2009 and 2010, to enable the task force to develop consensus recommendations on forage fish management. The first of these workshops was held in Alexandria, Virginia, in May 2009. The task force will propose how management should change and what standards should be in place to ensure sustainable ecosystems in the face of limited scientific information. The work of the task force will be groundbreaking in that it will move beyond identifying basic principles by developing and recommending practically applicable standards and tools necessary to transition to an EBFM approach. The task force will address questions including:

• The extent to which forage fisheries reduce the food supply for dependent fish, mammal, and bird species;
  
  
• Whether and how forage fisheries impede recovery of interacting, marine species;
  
  
• How managers might respond to increased mortality from recovering predator populations;
  
  
• How management approaches could be modified to account for dependent species, changes in primary productivity and climate, and the uncertainty and variability of the dynamics of forage stocks;
  
  
• Whether current assessment models explicitly, and accurately, account for predator mortality and other trophic web dynamics as well as oceanographic variability when predicting sustainable catch levels—and if not, to consider better ways to account for such variability;
  
  
• The effects of forage stock depletion on predator populations and reproductive success, and ways to avoid such depletion; and,
  
  
• Appropriate “default” standards for when little or no scientific information is available.