Fishery Managers Look to Remove Protections for Overfished Pacific Sardine

The Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) has advanced new management measures that will threaten the recovery of Pacific sardines and undermine a newly created rebuilding plan developed in response to a lawsuit by Oceana.

Pacific sardines off the U.S. West Coast are a critical source of food for whales, sea lions, pelicans, salmon, and other ocean animals. The Pacific sardine population has declined by more than 97% since 2006 and is at its lowest population level since the 1980s.

In 2025, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries finalized a rebuilding plan for the northern subpopulation of Pacific sardines in response to their collapse. The PFMC, however, is now proposing a new “stock definition” for Pacific sardines that would combine the collapsed northern subpopulation with the southern subpopulation found primarily off Mexico to increase the total coastwide population estimate. This move — driven by an executive order by President Trump — would bypass conservation measures in place designed to rebuild the overfished population of Pacific sardine.

“Today’s action is incredibly shortsighted and further threatens whales, salmon, sea lions, pelicans, and other animals already under duress from a massive Super El Niño and other stresses,” said Dr. Geoff Shester, Senior Scientist for Oceana. “Pacific sardines are the energy bars of the ocean and while they may be small, they play a huge role in the ocean food web. Yet rather than giving a newly created rebuilding plan a chance to work, fishery managers are instead playing games with the numbers to hide the ball from the public and further push sardines and the animals that rely on them further toward catastrophe.”

BACKGROUND

Pacific sardines are small schooling fish that are essential food for humpback whales, dolphins, sea lions, brown pelicans, Chinook salmon, and other important commercially and recreationally caught fish. Historically, the sardine population once supported the largest fishery in the Western Hemisphere and population numbers peaked at three to four million metric tons before mismanagement and overfishing led to a crash of the sardine population more than 70 years ago.

While sardines naturally have “boom and bust” population cycles, overfishing and other human caused impacts increase those natural population declines, with catastrophic results. When forage fish populations collapse, the loss can cascade through ocean ecosystems, as evidenced in the mid-2010s when more than 8,000 starving sea lion pups and yearlings washed up on California beaches, and brown pelicans experienced unprecedented reproductive failures.

After years of overfishing, NOAA Fisheries officially declared the Pacific sardine population “overfished” in 2019. This designation required the agency to prepare a rebuilding plan within two years that would quickly recover fish numbers. But in 2021, NOAA Fisheries issued a rebuilding plan that contained no significant changes to management.

In response, Oceana sued the agency, arguing that rebuilding plan was inadequate and did not follow the law. In April of 2024, Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi ruled for Oceana that NOAA Fisheries failed to meet its legal obligation to rebuild the sardine population. The judge also ruled that, based on extensive scientific evidence in the record, the previous plan would not ensure the population would rebuild within the legally required timeframe or protect it from overfishing.

NOAA Fisheries released a new rebuilding plan in 2025 that limits the annual catch of sardines at either 5% of the population, or 2,200 metric tons, depending on population estimates for each year. Modeling by fishery scientists indicate that so long as the population does not decrease much further, that approach is expected to eventually recover the population.