The Pacific herringan oily, silvery, schooling fishis rarely high on the list of marine animals people fret about.
But for the second straight year, the Canadian government has ignited a skirmish in British Columbia by moving to let fishing nets scoop up spawning herring, despite objections from scientists, Native people, and even commercial fishing groups.
“Last year it almost got to a warlocals were geared up to block fishing boats in port,” said Tony Pitcher, a fisheries scientist with the University of British Columbia. “There were more police on the dock than there were local people.”
This unusual battle is part of a global debate about the future of some of the oceans’ most important fish: the abundant schools of sardines, squid, smelt, anchovies, and herring that serve as forage for larger animals in the sea.
Scientists like Pitcher argue that too few governments take into account the essential role these forage fish play in marine systems before deciding how many of them can be caught.
Herring, in particular, are energy-rich creatures that often swim close to shore and provide nutritious meals for everything from pelicans and sea ducks to humpback whales, sea lions, sharks, larger fish, and even bears.
“They are the Kobe beef of the forage-fish world,” said Julia Parrish, a seabird ecologist with the University of Washington, in Seattle. “You have to eat four times as much of some other fish to get the same energy content.”
A Global Problem
In many places around the world, herring populations are quite healthy. Norwegian herring still support the globe’s second largest fishing fleet.
But herring populations in other spots may be a mere fraction of what they once were. Archaeologists counting herring bones at 171 sites along North America’s west coast recently found evidence they said suggested that the fish had been abundant for thousands of years. Modern herring stocks, on the other hand, swing wildly, and after a decline many don’t roar back as fast or as high as they once did.
Herring populations outside Juneau, Alaska, crashed in 1982 and have never come back. Prince William Sound herring collapsed in 1993. Washington State’s largest herring population has declined 90 percent since 1973, and herring that used to live for ten years now rarely survive more than four.
These issues aren’t limited to North American waters. Some Baltic Sea herring populations have fallen below their long-term average, and the fish are smaller and thinner than they used to be. North Sea herring are getting older as fewer young fish survive. One of Japan’s largest herring populations has been too small to fish for several decades.
“Herring are a linchpin in the food chain,” said Phil Levin, who oversees ecosystem sciences at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. But throughout much of the Pacific, “what you see over and over is a pretty dramatic declinethere’s less herring, they’re smaller, and the older, bigger herring seem to be gone.”
Scientists recently have started cataloging potential consequences.
In 2011, researchers found that everywhere they lookedthe Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific, or the seas around Antarcticaseabirds declined whenever forage fish numbers plummeted.
Last fall, scientists determined that diving seabirds like Western grebes or common murres, which depend on herring and other forage fish, are 16 times more likely to be dwindling than are birds that also eat other fish.
“There’s obviously something going on with herring, and it’s not good,” said Ignacio Vilchis, formerly with the University of California, Davis, who led the seabird research.
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