Anchovie boom in Puget Sound

Anybody else see this on Ch 7? I've been fishing PS since I moved to Seattle in 1980. But I've never heard a word about Anchovies around here. Sounds good to me. Anything that improves the bio mass is good. Blackmouth should love the things.

https://www.kiro7.com/amp/news/south-sou...orcas/958357723

Folks have been telling me about anchovy in PS for a couple decades. May, perhaps, be good. But, in a quick look, they are not as nutritionally dense as herring. A stomach full of anchovy is not as good as a stomach full of herring. But it beats an empty stomach.

Not too long ago I read a piece which suggested that large amounts of forage fish might take some predatory (think pinnipeds) pressure off out migrating salmonids.

(But watch out when that biomass of forage fish drops precipitously and 19,000 or more very hungry seals go looking for a meal)

That will work if the pinnipeds can/will switch. But, again, the quality of the fish will be important. Up in AK, fisheries forced Steller's Sealions to shift to less nutrient dense fish. They got smaller.

I believe that sea lions, at least down here, favored and concentrated on lamprey as the preferred food. By eliminating lamprey, we made them switch.

Inner Eagle Harbor was full of them around 10 years ago in January. BM were nuts for them, I limited regularly casting jigs off the dock at the marina, or live lining an anchovy off the back of my slip. Never started the engine for a month, and have never seen them back since.

Don't let the commercial fleet in on this anchovies fishery, while probably not the best feed, it never the less, is a feed.

Two thumbs up!

I saw one of the best searun cutthroat feeding sprees on anchovies on southern Hood Canal a few years ago.
Cutts were spraying bait everywhere. It was pretty impressive and the anchovies were a few different sizes.
Some where so small they almost looked transparent with only a redistribution orange dot where their gills where.
I’m glad I got some video of it.
SF

Anchovies in the South Sound have been around a lot longer than what the journalist writes. Checking my journals I have logged at least 1996 as the earliest I've encountered them.

Hood Canal has encountered for years, but little is mentioned of them.