Forage species are critical ecosystem components, occupying mid-trophic levels with the potential to impact most commercially important piscivorous fish species, marine birds and mammals. Additionally, directed commercial fishing on forage species accounts for more than 30% by weight of the total landings of fisheries globally. These landings are used both for human consumption and as protein for aquaculture and agriculture operations around the world. Many forage species are also culturally important and support local and indigenous communities.
Examples of forage species and community members to be considered by the working group include small, schooling, low- or mid-trophic level, pelagic fishes that are planktivorous throughout their life history (e.g., herring, anchovy, sardine), mesopelagic fishes (e.g., myctophids), euphausiids, and squids. Forage species are difficult to manage sustainably. Historical populations have often oscillated through “boom and bust” cyclical dynamics attributed to both bottom-up processes (e.g., regime shifts or changes in marine productivity due to climate variability) that are amplified by top-down impacts (e.g., natural mortality due to increasing predators or overfishing). As a group, forage taxa have relatively short life spans, potential for high recruitment, depensatory mortality, and density-dependent dynamics, are sensitive to both climatic and anthropogenic impacts and may exhibit rapid responses to changing conditions. Climatic and anthropogenic impacts are likely to change marine and estuarine systems and their forage communities in unanticipated ways, which will require adaptive and flexible management systems to maintain both sustainable fisheries and the ecosystem services that forage species provide.
From 2019-2023, a joint ICES-PICES working group on Small Pelagic Fish (
WGSPF/WG 43) focused on establishing a multidisciplinary and global community of researchers to compare and contrast ecosystem-level approaches to determining the cause of fluctuations in populations of forage species and synthesize mechanisms linking climate and ecosystem variability and the population dynamics. The Working Group then connected these dynamics to socio-ecological systems and best practices in ecosystem-based fisheries management.
These efforts culminated in an international symposium on “
Small Pelagic Fish: New Frontiers in Science and Sustainable Management” (November 7–11, 2022, Lisbon, Portugal), two peer-reviewed publications (a Special Issue in
Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences and a Theme Section in
Marine Ecology Progress Series) containing 28 original research papers, and a perspectives manuscript anticipated to be submitted to either
Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries or
Progress in Oceanography.
The synthesis of the
WGSPF/WG 43 noted several areas of emerging technologies and methods that can be used to better manage and adapt to changing forage dynamics. These include innovative technologies such as genetics, acoustics, underwater imagery, predator-inferred distributions, and isotopes, as well as novel and emerging analysis techniques such as artificial intelligence, management strategy evaluation, social network modeling, and simulation testing methods. In particular, international collaboration on the development of novel technologies to survey and monitor forage fish populations, simulation testing of management in the face of climate changes, and inclusion of climate and other anthropogenic drivers into management would be useful on a global scale to develop strategies that could lead to robust and sustainable ecosystem approaches to management of forage species. To that end, we are proposing to build on and expand the work of WGSPF, with the establishment of a new joint ICES-PICES working group with a three-year term beginning in mid-2024 that will address the following terms of reference.