It’s the second year that an unusually large number of herring have made their way to the Upper Lynn Canal to spawn near Mud Bay, and state scientists say they have no clear understanding of where the fish are coming from.
Data on the local herring run is not easy to find. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game doesn’t conduct regular surveys of herring egg deposits in the Haines, Skagway and Upper Lynn Canal area.
“Most of our information has come from reports of local residents or pilots flying in the area, with an occasional [Fish and Game] observation,” said Fish and Game’s southeast herring research supervisor Kyle Hebert.
This year, herring were spotted in Mud Bay and in Portage Cove for several days in May. A widely-shared aerial photograph showed miles of spawn wrapping around Ayiklutu and the tip of the Chilkat Peninsula. Based on that photo and her own observations, local commercial Fish and Game biologist Nicole Zeiser estimated that herring were spawning along three miles of shoreline.
Sitka got close to 90 miles of spawn this year, and Craig got just over 17 miles, Hebert said when you take away those large stocks, other places in Southeast get between 5-10 miles of spawn. In recent years, other areas where herring are returning to Southeast have been getting lower returns, like 2-4 miles of spawn.
“Relative to an area that hasn’t had spawning really of any appreciable amount for decades, maybe it’s a lot,” Hebert said.
Despite a lack of accessible historical data about the Upper Lynn Canal herring run, Hebert has a theory about where the local herring might be coming from.
“We have observed in recent years that herring spawn along the shoreline near Berner’s Bay seems to be shifting northward, with observations around 10 miles north of Point St. Mary,” he wrote in an email. “This is unusual relative to our historical observations, but it would still be a long way to Mud Bay … we don’t really have evidence to link these two spawning stocks.”
Fish and Game researchers, local fishermen and residents agree that this year’s run is unusually large, including Pat Philpott, who remembers another large herring run from the early 1960s.
“I was pretty young,” he said. “I remember coming home from the school and there [were] buckets of herring eggs all over the kitchen and all over the shed. People [were] stopping by and getting bagfulls.”
Philpott said his dad, Lon “Shorty” Philpott, had put a cotton herring net out at the Port Chilkoot dock.
When his dad retrieved it the next day, Philpott remembers it being 2 inches thick with herring eggs.
“The reason I remember it is because I like herring eggs and I didn’t have to pick any [spruce] needles out of them,” he said.
A common traditional way to harvest herring eggs is to sink spruce or hemlock boughs into the water and the herring will spawn on them.
“But they spawned on that cotton net. This old cotton string. It’s soft, so I guess the eggs stick to it,” he said. “My mom cooked them up, it was dinner. I was happy.”
Philpott said it was a rare treat when that volume of herring spawned in the area.
“I remember older people talking about it like, ‘yeah I got a couple of buckets. Yeah I got a ton. I got bait for the next two years.’”
He got some of his beloved herring eggs this year too, but from Sitka — not the Chilkat Valley’s surprisingly large run.
“Nobody did it here and the weather wasn’t right to go out and set branches,” he said.
Philpott said there has been a lot of variation over the years in the size of the local herring run and he has a lot of theories as to why: that they’re being pushed north by fishermen chasing them in Sitka; that the trawl fishery is wiping out the predatory fish that eat the herring, or because herring are running out of room to spawn elsewhere.
Fish and Game’s Hebert has been doing herring stock assessments in Southeast Alaska for decades. During that time, most of the state’s research funding has been spent on commercially viable fisheries.
“If there’s no fishery on the books then we typically don’t have a stock assessment program,” he said. “There are areas where we haven’t had fisheries for years where we continue to do at least aerial surveys from time to time just to keep our finger on the pulse of what is going on.”
But that gap in research is likely to become more pronounced in the next few years.
“It’s actually bad timing for herring to be spawning in Haines because just in the past two years the department has decided to pull back on herring aerial surveys for other areas where we have done surveys routinely,” he said.
That means making an argument for spending money on surveying in and around the Chilkat Valley will be even tougher.
But if given an unlimited research budget, Hebert said he’d stick with the basics, of aerial surveys and building good maps of spawn over the years. He’d also like to see sampling of the adult herring, so they can estimate the age of the run and the size of the herring at each age.
By knowing the age of the spawning fish, scientists would be able to see if the entire population was growing, or if it’s just one abnormally large age group of fish.
“It might help us understand what caused this [area] to suddenly start having substantial spawn out of the blue,” he said.
Hebert said researchers just started a genetic study through NOAA looking at DNA to understand the genetic structure of herring throughout Southeast. They hope to figure out if and how the large herring stocks are connected, but won’t have results from that study for a few years.
In the meantime, local residents can help to close that local research gap by making reports to the local fish and game office when they see herring spawn, taking photos, and noting where the spawn is located, whether it’s just seeing milt in the water or eggs on the beach.
“The more accurate a description of where things are happening and when they’re happening the better,” he said. “Any info is helpful but the more specific information is better.”