In 1952, while casting about for graduate study programs, a young John McGowan wrote a letter to Scripps instructor Martin Johnson, an invertebrate zoologist studying plankton. Johnson encouraged McGowan to apply to Scripps, apprising him of a new program, called CalCOFI, that involved repeated measurements of the California Current. McGowan, now a professor emeritus of biological oceanography with Scripps’s Marine Life Research Group (MLRG), looks back on those days and says matter-of-factly, “The reason I came to Scripps was CalCOFI.”

The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations, known as CalCOFI, has had an enormous impact on the research of many at Scripps, and beyond. In addition to providing a foundation of data for researchers to build on, the program has assembled the largest zooplankton collection in the world, revolutionized fisheries management, and helped scientists understand large-scale environmental change. Celebrating its 50th year of continuous operation in 1999, CalCOFI boasts a history encompassing hundreds of thousands of ocean measurements and net tows taken during 300 cruises. This is precisely what makes the program so significant: history.

Quicktime Movie 28k 56k T1+

The CalCOFI story begins with the mystery surrounding the disappearance of a small silvery fish, the sardine. During the 1920s and 1930s more sardines were caught off the California coast than any other fish in North America. Then the annual catch plummeted from 550,000 metric tons (606,265 short tons) in 1945 to just 100,000 metric tons (110,230 short tons) two years later, and California’s economy suffered. CalCOFI was formed in 1949 to determine the cause of the sardine’s radical decline. It is now a collaborative effort among MLRG at Scripps, the California Department of Fish and Game, and the Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC), a regional branch of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Next