“ We have triggers around us that remind us about these cycles that we're going through. It isn't always my clock or my calendar or my cell phone buzzing to tell me,” said Nick Chowdhury, IMAWG.
As March begins off the coast of Vancouver Island, subtle cues like the changing colour of the ocean, the gathering of seagulls, eagles, sea lions, and orcas, and even the scent on the air, tell us two things. The herring are spawning, and Spring is near.
Nick Chowdhury is the president of the Island Marine Aquatic Working Group, or IMAWG, and is a member of Da’naxda’xw First Nation. Chowdhury says there are signs all around us to show the passing of time, and the changing of seasons.
“ Sometimes it's noticing that we're at a full moon again already, or that the weather outlook for the next week has got nothing but showers in it all day, every day, and you go, ‘oh yeah, we're moving into a new season. It's not freezing anymore.’ Those connections, those reminders, they bring us back and that's part of what the magic of this is, whether you're indigenous or not, if you have that connection to seeing the herring spawn, to knowing what that colour change in the water means, to see the seagulls swarming in circles and diving down and feeding,” Chowdhury said. “If you're lucky enough, and you're out near the water long enough to see other animals, whales, seals, sea lions, interacting around all of this happening. It just spreads.”
Chowdhury was describing an event that happens around this time every year: schools of herring return to shorelines surrounding the Strait of Georgia, where the females lay their eggs on substrate, and the males fertilize them. This is the herring spawn.
“What that entails is the school of herring moving right into the intertidal, subtidal habitat, and the females lay their eggs on a substrate,” said Jaclyn Cleary, DFO. “So they'll pick kelps or eelgrass, or rock or cobble or the bottom of a boat. And the females lay their eggs in these kind of rows and the eggs come out of the female in this sticky substance and it sticks to the substrate, and then at the same time, the males release their milt. So we see the herring spawning because we see how the milt affects the colour of the water, and that's what gives it this milky, bright blue colour, [that] kind of looks like Hawaii in February.”
Jaclyn Cleary works for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) as program head of the Pacific Herring Assessment at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo. She gave context to the spawn, and where it lies in the life cycle of herring.
“And so by about a week you can see eyes in the eggs if you're down in the intertidal,” she said, “you can take a look at some herring spawn and you can see the little eyes and you can see the teeny herring inside the egg. And they start to hatch out around two weeks, so we like to survey them at that midpoint when the eggs are big enough to be able to count, but that they're not hatching out yet.”
Cleary said that divers count the eggs in the ocean once the milt has cleared enough to see, and the eggs are developed enough. This count is then used to back-calculate, and estimate the number of adults that laid those eggs based on factors like how many eggs fit in a female herring. That information is then used to understand how many herring are in the area, and to study what affects the herring population, their survival, and their ability to come back and spawn every year.
“So that could be studying what eats them, also studying what they eat, and studying how they interact with their environment,” she said.
This information, or ‘estimation of abundance’ as Cleary calls it, also informs conservation objectives, like what biomass threshold to keep the herring stock above in order to support the ecosystem.
“Science's role is to provide advice about the biomass and the probability of meeting these conservation objectives under different harvest strategies. And that advice goes through a peer review process, and then it goes into a consultation process with Fisheries Management,” Cleary explained. “So Fisheries Management will engage in consultations with First Nations communities, indigenous harvesters, [and] commercial fishermen, to hear from herring users what they're interested in and what their individual objectives are. And then the decision on harvest is made through the Fisheries Management process.”
We heard earlier from Nick Chowdhury of IMAWG, an organization that works closely with the DFO and First Nations around fisheries management.
Chowdhury said that the Department is working more now to respect that relationship with First Nations, but he remembers a time when the Fisheries Minister ignored their warnings that there was not enough herring to sustain commercial fishing that year, and declared a commercial opening anyway.
“This was a few years back now, but I still hear the reminders through stories to this day of the people who sat there in their communities, and watched the commercial herring fisheries fleet go by with empty nets, trying to catch fish when there was no herring,” he said. “Though on that end, the Department is working more with First Nations to understand and to kind of build that space that I like to look forward to where Indigenous knowledge and science come together. And the best advice is put forward to appropriately manage fisheries.”
Chowdhury said that this need for conservation is about taking care of things, and protecting the environment and resources for generations to come; not just for one tribe or one nation, but for all.
“When I explained this notion to some people I was talking with about building some potential collaboration with, they were an non-Indigenous group, and they wanted to understand why we do what we do in the Island Marine Aquatic Working Group,” Chowdhury recalled. “And when I broke down that point of sharing with all in the future, a person on the call actually got very honest and he said, 'I always thought you just– when First Nations people said that they wanted to protect the resources for generations to come, they meant for themselves' but no, we share with everyone. That's part of who we are, and why this is important to us. We wanna make sure there's enough for everyone, not just for us, not just for First Nations, but for all.”
Chowdhury said that when we look to just about any species, there is a need for conservation, but that with herring it is very easy to identify.
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