After more than 25 years since they all but disappeared from Powell River’s coastline, spawning herring returned last month and brought with them a plethora of sea creatures including sea lions, dolphins, orca, eagles and more than a few curious humans.
Palm Beach resident, marine photographer, and self-described amphibiographer Terry Brown was in his yard at the beginning of March when he heard a barking sea lion quite close. He went down to the beach to investigate and saw the milky water. At first he thought he was seeing the beach’s white sandy bottom, but then quickly realized he was witnessing a herring spawn.
“I’ve wanted to see this since I moved to the coast nine years ago,” said Brown.
Adult herring move in vast schools and migrate to shallow water to lay their eggs. Males release milt that fertilizes the thousands upon thousands of eggs. The milt turns the water white and the eggs cling to eelgrass, seaweed, rocks or anything else that affords them shelter to hatch. The spawning herring cause quite a stir.
Anyone new to living on the Upper Sunshine Coast could be excused for not knowing what the patches of milky water signify.
Growing up on Texada Island John Zaikow saw how the fishing was and how things abruptly changed after the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) opened up a bait fishery in the mid-1980s and scooped out five tonnes of herring from Marble Bay.
People at the time were concerned that there was not even that much herring in the bay but they were reassured by DFO stock estimates, he said.
Herring are a keystone forage fish, which puts them right in the middle of the marine food web, a visual representation of the relationships between species in the ocean.
They feed on plankton, tiny plants and animals that form the base food source for the marine food chain. Sea birds, sea lions, salmon, ling cod and humpback whales all rely on the herring to survive.
The salmon and ling cod, among others that had come in to feed on the herring, have all but disappeared in the area after the herring stocks collapsed, Zaikow said.
“They took the herring out and they never did come back,” he added. “Within a few years you could tell the big springs were not coming into the bay anymore.”
Zaikow chalks up the failure to “bad science.” One does not need to be a marine biologist, he said, to understand the effect that over fishing and harvesting the fishes’ eggs will have on the stock. “It’s so bizarre, the whole mismanagement of it all.”
In total, the herring seiners hauled out about seven metric tonnes of herring from the water around Powell River during the openings of 1983 and 1984.
“It’s nice to see them coming back,” said Sliammon Salmon Hatchery manager Lee George, who thought he would never be able to fish in the traditional Tla’amin (Sliammon) First Nation ways again near his home.
George, 50, grew up on the waterfront at Tla’amin and remembers how important the herring roe and fish were as a traditional food source. He, his brother Roy Francis and friends and family, would collect the fish roe from the intertidal zone right in front of their home and at locations nearby.
Archaeological field studies in Scuttle Bay, by Simon Fraser University researchers, have shown that first peoples have been fishing for herring there for thousands of years.
“It’s taken over 25 years for us to get those fish back,” said George. “It’s great to see and I bet people in the Powell River area feel the same way.”
George said that DFO does not think there is such a thing as resident herring stocks that live in one area. “We say nonsense,” he said. “We’ve got historical evidence.”
At low tide, roe collectors would anchor cedar boughs to the beach during the spawning. After the fish had laid their eggs, and the tide had gone back out, they would collect the boughs laden with roe and hang them up to dry in the sun and wind. Fishermen would also go out in canoes with herring rakes and try to snag some of the fish.
It is thought that herring have an average lifespan of 10 years and females may lay eggs every three years.
DFO scientists maintain that the department has taken a conservative approach to their stock estimates and herring cut-off levels.
In 2006 the central and west coast were closed to commercial roe fishing to protect declining stocks. DFO estimates that the numbers of fish dipped below 25 per cent, the level which commercial fisheries are no longer considered to be sustainable. Last year the fisheries department conducted a herring assessment that indicated the stock had begun to rebuild and was robust enough for a limited opening.
Vancouver Island first nations opposed it arguing the stocks were too weak.
George and others in Tla’amin watched and waited to see how the government would deal with the emerging standoff. The DFO decided not to have an opening on the west coast, which may have helped to improve stocks, but as a concession to the commercial fishermen who had already bought licences, fisheries offered them the opportunity to shift over to the eastern side of the island to fish the waters between Qualicum and Comox.
“They did well and took their quotas,” said George, “but we’re waiting to see what the impacts of that opening is going to have on the returns here over the next few years.”
Dr. Douglas Hay, a scientist at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo where DFO conducts its herring assessments, said that researchers in 2007 looked at the “serial depletion effect,” (a hypothesis that puts the blame for past decades of herring decline on commercial roe fisheries) but did not find a solid connection.
Researchers compared 36 years of catch and spawn data in almost 100 locations, looking for a connection between the fisheries and declining stocks, but did not find anything conclusive, said Hay. A more probable explanation for reduced stocks may reside in rising levels of coastal industrial pollution, he added.
One place on the coast that has made a dramatic turnaround due to cleaner water is Howe Sound. After years of acid pollution leaching from a mine at Britannia Creek, efforts were made to clean up the area and restore fish habitat. It’s been dubbed the “Miracle of Howe Sound.”
Once the eelgrass started to grow back in the cleaner water the herring started to return. Volunteer naturalists wrapped the creosote-covered pilings in the sound with landscaper’s cloth to protect the eggs and over the past few years big schools of herring have returned drawing grey whales, Pacific white-sided dolphins and pods of orca back into the sound.
A short video of the herring spawn on Palm Beach from filmmakers Brown and Jeremy Williams can be viewed online.
