Go fish! Monterey a model for ocean conservation

With its deep blue waters now teeming with life, it’s hard to fathom that there was a time when whales, otters, sardines, kelp and other marine life were stricken here, fished to near depletion or driven elsewhere by the warming and changing of the currents.

While natural and man-made pressures still persist, seeing the bay now is to view it through the lens of what many consider a model success story of ocean conservation.

Today, the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary is the largest protected ocean area in the continental United States, spanning 6,094 square miles from the waters just north of San Francisco to the southern end of the Big Sur coast.

“It really has come back incredibly,” says Paul Greenberg, a James Beard Award-winning author who has probed the state of this country’s seafood in his best-selling books, “American Catch” and Four Fish.

In the 1930s, Julia Platt, former Pacific Grove mayor and a doctor of marine zoology, pioneered legislation that created one of the first marine protected areas that many scientists credit for helping otters to recover in Monterey Bay.

Crab lovers know all too well how last year’s warmer water temperatures have been responsible for persistent domoic acid poisoning that has delayed the opening of the state’s commercial Dungeness season.

Scientists also cite those temperature fluctuations for a decline in the anchovy population, which has led whales in search of food to swim so close to shore last summer and fall that they could be seen from the terrace of the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Cannery Row.

[...] unusual water temperatures, coupled with potential overfishing, have wreaked havoc on local sardines — so much so that authorities canceled the 2015-16 West Coast commercial sardine fishing season.

With fewer anchovies and sardines, unprecedented numbers of skinny and starving sea lions have been reported in recent years all along the coast.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation donated $55 million to build the pioneering aquarium, where daughter Julie Packard, who studied marine algae at the University of Santa Cruz, has been its one and only CEO.

“Opening people’s eyes to what was right in the bay played a big part in getting people to appreciate this great resource,” says Peterson, who noted there are about two dozen marine science institutions now operating in the area.