We hear from the scientist who discovered Japanese sardines off the coast of California for the first time and discuss what it means for the future.
Dive In with NOAA Fisheries |
West Coast
A school of Pacific sardines. Credit: NOAA Fisheries/Dale Sweetman
In 2022, Dr. Gary Longo detected Japanese sardines swimming in the eastern Pacific, off the coast of California. This was the first time they’d ever been seen here—their normal range is in the western Pacific from Korea to Russia, thousands and thousands of miles away. It was a shocking discovery. Sardines are incredibly important to the California current ecosystem and are a key forage fish across the globe.
On this episode of Dive In with NOAA Fisheries, we scratch at this mystery of Japanese sardine appearing in U.S. waters. How did they get here? What does it mean for the native Pacific sardine? Are they staying? (Spoiler alert: so far, yes.)
We hear from Dr. Longo, a research scientist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and one of the authors of a new study documenting this discovery. The authors suggest marine heatwaves that warmed the North Pacific over the last decade might have opened a corridor of favorable habitat, which the Japanese sardines followed across the ocean.