Low sardine populations can’t just be blamed on climate change, say experts
In 1984, sardines beached near the Wild Coast Casino sending locals into a frenzy.the huge runs of yesteryear appear to have stopped, says the writer, and no one knows why.
WHAT’S happened to the greatest shoal on Earth – that extraordinary annual phenomenon that usually sees thousands of ocean predators from game fish and seals through to huge pods of dolphins and vast shivers of sharks embark on a feeding frenzy on billions of sardines as they migrate up the Kwazulunatal coast each year?
On a good run, flocks of gannets add to the spectacle, transforming into avian torpedoes, dive-bombing into shoals which have in the past reached up to 20km – eight times the length of an average commercial airport runway.
Each year, from May to August, people from all over South Africa phone the KZN Sharks Boards to find out when and where the action is expected to take place.
For the past five years, though, there has been disappointment, and not just among visitors.
First documented by The Natal Mercury on August 4, 1853, the sardine run has become part of the socio-economic and cultural fabric of Kwazulu-natal.
“It’s not like it used to be,” said the Sharks Board’s head of operations, Mike Anderson-reade, who has monitored the run for 38 years, also facilitating documentaries that have taken the phenomenon into the homes of television viewers worldwide.
The sardine run emanates from the cold waters off Agulhas Bank in the Cape – home to a vast biomass of sardines which thrive in temperatures under 21ºc. In winter months, a thin band of cold water occurs along the east coast, enabling sardines to migrate to spawn up north. In KZN this band forms an even narrower tongue close to shore, giving rise to sensational sardine runs.
Anderson-reade can recall occasions when hundreds of thousands of sardines would literally be driven out of the water, as happened on beaches near the Wild Coast Casino in Port Edward in 1984.
“Front-end loaders had to be brought in to move stranded sardines off the beach. A few years after that, we had a similar event at Trafalgar.”
Many communities benefit from the runs. Taking into account the influx of visitors, game fishing enterprises, dive charters and boast-based viewing, tourism revenue can reach up to R500 million per season.
This year, typical manic sardine excitement occurred on the beaches of Scottburgh in late June, and around Ramsgate and St Michaels in late July, but came nowhere near to meeting expectations of tourism role-players, commercial fishermen and the informal seine-netting sector.
In a good season, informal shoreline seine-netting has been estimated to generate as much R6m at point of sale on the beach.
But runs and catches over the past few years have been small, said Kevin Bremmer, a former KZN commercial fisherman now based in Cape St Francis.
So what’s going on? Is climate change wreaking havoc with hereditary migration patterns of the Sardinops sagax, also known as the Southern African pilchard. Has over-fishing taken its toll? Or are the recent “no shows” just a typical passing blip in the evolutionary scheme of things?
Bremmer believes overfishing of the massive sardine biomass off Mossel Bay has caused a big decline in recent years. “Twelve years ago, when the pilchard fleets from the West Coast started operating off Mossel Bay, I predicted that pilchard stocks would decline, impacting on the annual sardine runs. And it’s happened. Stocks have been hammered.”
In KZN this year, sardine netting rights were awarded to 35 commercial operators, but only 14 activated their licences, said Bremmer. He believes these businesses are probably now running at a loss as netting costs are high, and yields currently very low.
Dewald Lourens, chief executive of Afro-fishing in Mos- s e l Bay, also expressed concern at low sardine stocks. Afro-fishing runs a small trawler and canning operation, supplying Lucky Star, Saldana and Glenryck Pilchards.
He said the total allowable catch for sardine fisheries in the Western Cape was down to 45 000 tons this year, compared to 90 000 tons over the past eight to nine years.
“We could only fish for a small period this year. We are having to import frozen cutlets from Morocco which we thaw, process and can, keeping people working.”
Lourens said scientific surveys over the past 30 years had shown fluctuations in estimated sardine populations with the total allowable catch having once dropped as low as 20 000 tons.
What causes these fluctuating populations remains a mystery, even to scientists, said Lourens.
A senior fisheries scientist at the Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries (Daff), Janet Coetzee, said predicting the “boom and bust” dynamics of sardine populations was a complex issue.
“It’s no secret that our sardine stocks are very low at the moment, but it would be simplistic to attribute this to overfishing alone,” said Coet-