Research Document - 2009/088

Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) biomass and migration rates in British Columbia

By J. Schweigert, G. McFarlane, and V. Hodes

Abstract

The Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) is a transient visitor to Canadian waters, annually migrating northward from spawning grounds off southern California. As the sardine population has rebuilt over the past few decades, the abundance of fish migrating into British Columbia waters has increased, as has interest in harvesting them. The difficulty in developing a harvest policy for sardines in Canadian Pacific waters is the uncertainty in the annual migration rate of the coastwide stock into British Columbia. Ware (1999) estimated the migration rate of sardine into Canadian waters based on the catches taken in the historical fishery and proposed a harvest policy based on the United States assessment model and assuming an annual 10 percent migration. A trawl survey has been conducted off the west coast of Vancouver Island since 1997 to monitor sardine abundance and distribution in Canadian Pacific waters with an objective of providing updated estimates of sardine distribution and migration rate. Based on our re-analysis of the available information on the sardine abundance in Canada from the trawl survey conducted on the west coast of Vancouver Island, we believe that the currently assumed harvest rate is conservative and should be updated. Based on the five years for which a comprehensive survey was conducted the average migration rate estimate is18.3 percent. Given that the survey region does not cover the known distribution of sardines in Canadian waters (such as the inlets of the west coast of Vancouver Island and Queen Charlotte Sound), this provides a precautionary estimate of migration for determining allowable harvest.

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