Taxonomy

Rarity

Abundance rates how many are in suitable habitat. Find difficulty rates how hard it is to locate one on a daylight snorkel or freedive through 50 ft. A higher find score means a harder search. The rarity category also reflects the kind of encounter; it is not an average of the 2 scores.

Seasonality

Location

Northern anchovy live from northern Vancouver Island south to Cabo San Lucas at the tip of Baja California, and they are most abundant between Point Conception, Santa Barbara and Point San Juanico in Baja. They are a fish of open coastal water rather than reef or bottom, usually holding within about 20 miles of the beach, though schools have been recorded as far as 300 miles out. They also come into bays and inlets, and one of the 2 recognized subspecies lives specifically in California bays.

The schools are the animal. Anchovies form large, tightly packed masses that behave as a single body, and that packing is a defense: a predator has trouble picking one fish out of thousands moving together. They have been recorded down to about 1,000 feet and usually stay in the top 700.

Feeding works 2 ways. An anchovy can swim with its mouth open and filter plankton out of the water at random, or it can pick individual animals off one at a time, which fisheries scientists describe as pecking. The food is krill, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called copepods, and the larvae of crabs and shrimps. A fish that eats plankton and gets eaten by nearly everything larger is the definition of a forage fish, and this one feeds recreationally and commercially important fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. Common thresher sharks hunt them directly, along with sardine, hake, mackerel and squid.

Deep Dive

The northern anchovy is a small fish that most of the California coastal food web runs through, and the interesting facts about it are all about scale and speed.

Start with the life. Maturity comes at about 3.8 inches, which most fish reach inside 2 years. FishBase records a maximum age of 7 years, and NOAA notes that in practice they rarely exceed 4. The maximum recorded length is 9.8 inches and the common length is under 6. A fish that lives 4 years, matures in 2, and spawns every week or so during the season is built to be eaten in enormous numbers and to replace itself just as fast.

Spawning is a night job, and a precisely timed one. Anchovies spawn all year with a peak from February through April, and the eggs go into the upper water layers between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m., in water between 50 and 74 degrees Fahrenheit. The heaviest spawning happens between Point Conception and Point San Juanico in Baja, with a second major area off central and southern Baja. Eggs hatch in 2 to 4 days.

The species is split into 2 subspecies, and the split is about geography rather than appearance. One lives along the open coast from British Columbia to Baja California. The other lives in the bays of California and stays there. Fish that stay in bays face different water and different predators from fish that live in the open ocean, and populations that stop mixing start to diverge.

The name says something about the animal too. The genus is the old Greek word for anchovy, but the species name is Latin for biting, given to a fish with a mouth that opens like a scoop and a jaw that runs back nearly past the eye. That oversized gape is the filter-feeding apparatus. It is what lets a 6 inch fish strain a mouthful of water and keep the krill in it.

What is not settled about northern anchovy is how many there are, and that is a genuinely open question rather than a formality. Neither United States stock gets a formal assessment, the 2022 look at the southern stock could not produce a population estimate, and the global conservation listing is Data Deficient. What is visible is the direction. NOAA describes the recent coastal ocean as dominated by a booming anchovy population, at the same time that Pacific sardine, the other great forage fish of this coast, sits below the biomass level that would let its fishery reopen.

Where to Find Them

Researched habitat and range candidates

These locations have suitable habitat within the species range. An assignment is a possible encounter, not a confirmed sighting at every beach. Season, depth, and local conditions still matter. Historical habitat without present-day evidence is excluded.