[MUSIC]
Monterey, California. An idyllic seaside town.
Tourists cram its busy streets, modern comforts at every turn.
The bay is an ocean sanctuary. It is home to hundreds of species from up and down the
California coast. But as I walk around this tourist town, I got the feeling that it wasn't
always like this.
Long before people came to Monterey to watch fish, they came here to catch them and they
caught a lot of one fish in particular. Now to get some more answers, I needed someone
with historical knowledge. And a sardine in his pocket.
This is the Monterey sardine. This fish produces a lot of oil and it is large and creates a
lot of fish meal. And so...
What is fish meal?
Fish meal being used for fertilizer and animal feed. And there was big money in this.
Can I eat that one?
Yeah!
War had created a demand for cheap and healthy source of protein, but the real money was
in the fish heads and tails and guts. They were cooked down and fed to animals or used
as fertilizer. Between the two World Wars, Monterey became the sardine capital of the
world, eventually immortalized in John Steinbeck's book 'Cannery Row.' It seemed like there was
an endless supply of sardines out there in the bay. You can probably tell where this
is headed.
At the peak of this industry, how many sardines were they pulling out of Monterey Bay?
An average of two hundred and thirty-five thousand tons of sardines every season. In
1930, at the annual sardine conference...
I bet they had killer parties at the world sardine conference...
Fish and Game presented a paper at this conference showing unless you guys take smaller catches,
these fish are gonna collapse in a few years. And nobody paid any attention.
In the years after World War 2, fishermen went out like they always had and came back
empty, because of overfishing and nature's cycle, the sardines had disappeared. And Monterey's
canneries with them.
Cannery Row's famous character Doc was based on Steinbeck's best friend Ed Ricketts, a
marine biologist who worked out of this lab. Steinbeck and Ricketts developed a philosophy
of nature based on the tide pools based on the around where they lived in Monterey. The
species that lived near one another are interconnected, often in complex ways we can't understand
and that remain invisible to us.
Ed, along with other scientists, had been warning fishermen for years that you can't
just take as much as you wanted of a single species out of the ocean and not expect any
consequences. It seems like an obvious idea today, but the field of ecology was just being
born at the time.
Since the arrival of the Europeans in Monterey Bay, there's been a pattern of taking one
species out of the ocean until there was no more. Whales, fish like salmon and sardines,
and otters. And when the otters were gone, the animals they ate like sea urchins and
abalone exploded. The kelp forest has destroyed, and an entire ecosystem was injured.
One day, people woke up and there just seemed like there wasn't any more sardines coming
out of this bay.
Do you have any sardines?
What happened then?
So tourism was really the saving point for Monterey. The aquarium was hugely important
to Monterey. This street totally changed when they opened the aquarium in 1984.
Years after this sardine boats left, nature began to slowly move back in. And the aquarium
moved in with it. Now a whole new ecosystem has sprung up. A population of scientists
and nature lovers connect and work together to carry on Ed Ricketts' philosophy. And these
days Monterey Bay's not just about hooking fish, it is about getting people hooked on
nature. They're not exporting sardines in cans, they are exporting sardine FANS.
Stay curious.