The Tiny Fish Whales Cannot Live Without

0:00 The future of whales, seabirds, salmon, and even commercial fisheries may depend on fish most people never even think about. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your weekly ocean news update. If you care about staying informed on the ocean every weekday, hit that follow button right now so you don't miss tomorrow's story. Today, we are talking about a strange problem in ocean conservation. Why do we pay so little attention to some of the most important fish in marine ecosystems? Because forage fish are essential. We've talked about it all week. Scientists know it, fisheries managers know it, conservation groups know it, but most people have never even heard of the term. And honestly, that may be part of the problem.

0:42 Ocean conservation often focuses on large charismatic animals. We have whales, we have sharks, sea turtles, dolphins, and that makes sense. People emotionally connect to those species. They inspire documentaries, campaigns, and donations. But ecosystems are not built around popularity. They are built around relationships, and forage fish sit near the center of many of those relationships. These small fish support predators across entire ecosystems. But because they are small, probably common-looking, and often commercially processed out of sight, they become almost invisible to the public. That invisibility creates a conservation challenge because public pressure often influences political priorities.

1:28 And it is much harder to build urgency around species people don't even recognize, especially when those species are caught in massive industrial volumes far from public attention. In many ways, forage fish suffer from a branding problem. But ecologically, they are incredibly important. This matters because conservation success often depends on protecting systems, not just individual species. You can protect whales all you want, but if whales cannot find enough food, recovery becomes harder. You can create marine protected areas, but if food webs become unstable, ecosystems still struggle. Forage fish force us to think differently about conservation. They remind us that ecosystems depend on abundance, not just survival.

2:13 This is one reason scientists increasingly support ecosystem-based management. The goal is not simply preventing collapse. The goal is maintaining healthy, functioning ecosystems, and that requires enough prey species in the water to support predators. There is a public awareness issue here, and a lot of people do not realize how interconnected ocean systems are. They may not understand that salmon, seabirds, whales, and tuna often compete for the same prey resources, and that industrial fishing can affect ecosystems in indirect ways. Once people understand those connections, that conversation changes. Suddenly, forage fish are no longer bait fish.

2:55 They become ecosystem infrastructure, and that framing actually matters. We're talking about communication here. And a lot of the times when we talk about communication, we know that it's really important. And one of the things that I covered last week was we know communication is important, but I had conversations over the week where it's like communication isn't funded enough or at a level where we can actually get communicators or marine influencers, science influencers, and science communicators to say, " Hey, let's talk about forage fish. Let's talk about the real important part of the ocean that will provide its stability, especially in warming times like we have with climate change, or in times where fishing pressure is at probably an all-time high, and we're starting to realize how important those forage fish are." So, if you are interested in finding out more of how you can communicate better and amplify your message better, whether it be about forage fish or anything that's important to you and your organization, or your company, or you're part of a larger academic project, or just in your academic lab, hit me up at piscesoceans.ca.

3:56 We have a tool there that I'll link in the show notes where you can go on the website and you can figure out where you need help the most. We're a consulting firm of scientists, ocean communicators, and project managers that can help you with your project and amplify your message. We understand the science. We understand how important science communication is for you and your organization, your company, and your project, and we want to make sure that it succeeds. So if you want to know more, go to the show notes, click on that link, or go to piscesoceans.ca. The good news about all of this is that awareness around forage fish conservation is growing. Researchers are improving ecosystem science, which is great. Conservation groups are increasingly pushing for precautionary management, which is also great.

4:40 And more policymakers are starting to recognize that ecosystem health requires protecting food web stability. But there are still some major challenges. Industrial demand for fish meal and fish oil remains high. Climate change is increasing ecosystem stress. And fisheries management decisions are often involve political and economic trade-offs. So this issue is not going away. In fact, it may become one of the more defining ocean conservation debates of the next decade because ultimately, this conversation is bigger than forage fish. It is really about how humans think about conservation and how humans think about the ocean. Do we only protect species that people emotionally connect with?

5:20 Or do we protect the systems that make entire ecosystems possible? That is the much bigger question. And honestly, the one the ocean urgently needs us to answer. One of the most memorable conversations I had is when people were saying, "Hey, look, sometimes it's great to be like, 'Hey, we're gonna protect sharks, we're gonna protect whales, we're gonna protect sea turtles, we're gonna protect polar bears,' because those are iconic species, the ones we emotionally connect with," like I mentioned earlier. But they're not necessarily the ones that we need to focus on. Yes, we need to focus on it and a lot of times they are in trouble. Sea turtles, most of them are critically endangered. We have polar bears who are critically endangered. North Atlantic right whale is critically endangered. We have a lot of animals that are in trouble. But a lot of the times it's not just because of the individual species, and managing the individual species is not gonna make things better right away.

6:05 But managing the ecosystem as a whole is going to make things better because you're gonna make sure that the foundation is there for that whale, that sea turtle, that shark, that polar bear. Making sure that we are managing everything together is important, but it's also the hardest thing, ' cause it's also the hardest thing to communicate. Because it's like, if you want to lose weight, you can eat nothing, no problem. That's a quick fix. But what you really have to do is you have to look at your lifestyle, and you have to say, "If I want to hold this weight off, or if I want to lose weight healthily, I have got to look at how I eat, how I sleep, how my mental health is, how, like, my whole lifestyle is. Is it active? Is it sedentary?" We have all these different ways of looking at health, and we do that when people actually get healthy, they end up losing weight because they look at their whole system and look at how to better protect that system.

6:54 The same thing is with the ocean. We're not just protecting individual species. If you protect the whole system, those species are inevitably protected. So good conservation is often not about protecting the most famous species. It's about protecting the system underneath the species we love. So that's the episode for today. I would love to hear your comments on these episodes, and I'd love for you to hear the episode tomorrow. You can go to speakupforblue.com/feedback to let me know what you think about these episodes. Don't forget to go to our sponsor, piscesoceans.ca. That's www.piscesoceans.ca. Link is in the show notes among other links of how to get a hold of me to have conversations with me. More and more of you are reaching out to me, and I love that.

7:36 If you just love the podcast and you wanna tell me, I love that. I always wonder who's listening to the podcast, how they're listening to the podcast, what app they're listening on. Are they going to YouTube for Ocean Decoded and all that kind of stuff? I want to know more. And what you want to know. Like, what topic do you want me to cover next? I would love to hear your thoughts on that. And don't forget, if you wanna hear more and you haven't followed this podcast, shame on you. No, I understand. Don't worry about it. But if you wanna follow the podcast, please do so now, and share this episode with somebody you think is gonna enjoy this episode and learn more about the ocean. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you tomorrow when I talk to Jack Daly from Oceana Canada, where we talk about forage fish report that they just released for Canada.

8:21 And it's not a good one, but you're gonna wanna hear it. So thank you so much. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.