The smell of spring — herring spawn marks the new season

Chowdhury says 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. Photo: Heather Watson / CHLY 101.7 FM

“ 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.

Female herring lay their eggs on substrate, like kelp, then males fertilize them with milt. This is what gives the water the “milky, bright blue colour” seen in this fly-over image near Qualicum Bay. Photo provided by IMAWG

“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.

“The numbers of what we see in herring today and the areas and the amount we see of herring spawn today are vastly low compared to what they were if you go 20 or 40 years ago,” he said. “There are elders today who know the difference, and the decline in herring is evident to them when they take a look at the spawn because many, many of us will eat the hearing eggs, and there's two ways it's collected and you can tell by the amount of eggs when collected, the thickness of the spawn, the thickness of the eggs. It's so reduced now that the elders even today can tell from when they were younger how much more there was.”

“And that's before we even got into any science assessment work that's been done. That's before we consider the decline in commercial fisheries. It's before we consider the impact on all the species that rely on herring and herring eggs for sustenance. What impacts them is going to impact us. If there aren't enough herring, and other species suffer for it, what are those other species? They're the bigger fish. The other fish we were talking about earlier,  salmon, whales, so many things. Again, going back to how it's all connected, those impacts eventually come back to us. Even if we say, ‘oh, I don't eat herring, or I don't eat herring eggs.’ The impacts eventually reach all of us in one way or another,” Chowdhury said.

According to Jaclyn Cleary, there are things we can all do to help conserve the herring population. Or rather, things we’d better not do.

“When herring spawning is imminent or when it's happening,” she said, “there's so much aliveness in the ecosystem. Like there's– you're gonna hear so many birds, and you're gonna see a lot of marine mammals. You're gonna see the milt in the water. There's a particular smell, it's like, ‘oh, herring are here’ there's a particular smell, of like early spring herring spawning kind of smell. It's really exciting to be out along the shore when there's herring spawning. And even if you come a few days later, you get to see the eggs; if the tide’s out, you’ll be able to see the eggs on the kelp.”

Crucially, it’s the egg-covered kelp that Cleary wants us to be aware of. The eggs themselves are very resilient, and when the tide goes out and leaves them on shore, they remain viable for hatching when the tide comes back in. 

Cleary says to “please leave the kelp on the shoreline!” The eggs themselves are very resilient, and when the tide goes out and leaves them on shore, they remain viable for hatching when the tide comes back in. Photo by Matthew Greffe, provided by IMAWG

“The reason why I'm bringing this up is because some people think that because the kelp is exposed that the eggs are dead and so therefore they could pick up the kelp and take it and dig it into their garden. And actually when that's happening, you're taking the potential for larval herring out of the environment,” Cleary said. “So that's my plug to please leave the kelp on the shoreline.”

While they may be better suited to sea beds than garden beds, these eggs on shore are an opportunity to observe herring at one of their earliest stages; Cleary said, “ if you actually sat and looked at them, you'd see the larvae moving around inside the egg.”

Ranging all the way up the food chain from herring eggs to hunting orcas, spend some time outside today if you want to catch the signs of Spring coming to a coastline near you. 

For posts tracking the herring spawn, and to read stories of people’s experiences with herring, visit IMAWG’s Pacific Herring Spawn Reporting page on Facebook.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada. Reporting done in the Comox Valley is done in partnership with CVOX.