



At the bottom of the track where two bright yellow funicular trains begin and end an 800-foot vertiginous trip through the Bica neighborhood, a social club and a local cafe have set up for the festival. On this night, it’s mostly locals, though a few German and French tourists have found their way to the party.

Four friends sit around a wobbly plastic table perched outside the G.D. Zip Zip social club. There’s just enough room for others to walk past and get to the homemade grill where the sardines are being cooked. Three of the friends have sardine skeletons and heads heaped on their plates. They talk about the fish that’s as iconic in Portugal in the summer as a hamburger on the grill in America.

This year, however, because of limits on fishing, it’s mostly only frozen fish that are available.

“We listen to it all year round that maybe this year, we will not have sardines,” Helena Melo says.

Fifteen feet up the hill, Jorge Rito, who has been cooking for the club every June for five years, wipes his watering eyes with the back of his hand. He’s just gotten another order and tosses a dozen whole sardines onto the grill in neat rows.

As he flips the silvery fish, each seven or eight inches long, a burst of smoke rises from the charcoal, and he wipes his eyes again.

“Worried? Yes, of course,” he says, removing the fish from the grill and placing them onto a platter. “It is important for our finances, our economies, for us.”

Baby sardines in trouble

Just as the next generation of humans may pay the highest price for climate change, the youngest generation of sardines is at risk.

Susana Garrido, a sardine researcher with the Portuguese Oceanic and Atmospheric Institute in Lisbon, says larval sardines are especially vulnerable to climate change when compared to other similar pelagic species, such as larval anchovies, which are capable of living in a wider range of temperatures.

Deep seawater upwelling dominates the waters off the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula and keeps the coastal waters cool. But small differences in temperature, especially when sardines are young, can have a significant impact on whether the fish larva dies or grows to maturity, Garrido says.









Other researchers had tested how well adult sardines survived in a variety of conditions, and there was little evidence that environmental variables such as food abundance and water temperature affected the full-grown fish, she says. So she focused on the larval stage of the species.

“We did a bunch of experiments varying salinity and all of these other variables, and they survived quite well,” she says. “It was when you change temperature that everything, yes, fell apart. So they have a very narrow range of temperatures where survival is good.”

Garrido says a recently completed stock assessment shows that the larval sardine population is extremely low.

“This is getting very serious,” she says.

The Portuguese sardine population started to fall about a decade ago, even though there were plenty of adults at the time to sustain large catches. And around the same time, southerly species, such as chub and horse mackerel, slowly moved in.

Chub mackerel, a subtropical species that was once found only in southern Portugal, is now caught all the way up the coast.

“Probably as a consequence of warming, it is now invading the main spawning area of sardines,” Garrido says.

Alexandra Silva, who works down the hall from Garrido, has been managing the Portuguese sardine stock assessment since the late 1990s – pivotal work that the organization uses to decide the size of the sardine catch.

When she started, the northern population of the species was in trouble following a period of strong upwelling that brought unusually cold water to the surface. The southern stock, however, was relatively healthy. And in the early years of the century, the species recovered.

It was not to last. These days, without large numbers of larvae growing to maturity, the population is near collapse all along the coast from Galicia in Spain to the southern end of the Portuguese coast.

All officials can do is cut down on the fishing. But larger forces, especially climate change, are now affecting the stock in ways that fisheries managers cannot control, the two say.

Regulators have tried.

Starting in 2004, they blocked fishing during the spring, when sardines spawn. And for a while, that seemed to work. Between 2004 and 2011, the stock remained relatively healthy, with landings ranging from about 55,000 to 70,000 tons, even if the population seemed to be dipping. (From the 1930s to the 1960s, and as recently as the 1980s, fishermen landed more than 110,000 tons in a year.)