Exxon Valdez, Herring
Dear Editor: Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound.
The spill happened at spawning time for the herring that year, so no sac roe herring fishery occurred there in 1989. Despite the countless unanswered questions about herring health, ADFG authorized a record-breaking sac roe fishery in 1990. State fisheries biologist James Brady commented “It’s almost ironic. You can see where the tanker was on the reef from here, but this area wasn’t touched.”
Exxon ran a huge ad in the Sitka Sentinel late that year congratulating everybody on a job well done: “The sac roe herring harvest, the largest of the Sound’s herring fisheries, was 38 percent higher than forecast. The catch totaled more than 8,800 tons. The purse seine fleet caught 8,300 tons in only 20 minutes — the highest catch rate ever recorded in Prince William Sound.”
In 1991, ADFG authorized another sac roe herring fishery in Prince William Sound. In 1992, again: this time they broke another record, for the highest total catch in 35 years of fishing. Isn’t that incredible? ADFG authorized two record breaking fisheries in the years immediately after an immense oil spill, before they could even assess possible damage to the fish which hatched in the midst of the spill.
In advance of the 1993 season, ADFG commissioner pointed out at a meeting of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council that “this is the year in which we would actually be looking at recruitment of the year class that was impacted by the oil spill.” It was supposed to be a record year for recruits into the mature spawning biomass, but the recruits didn’t show. The fishery collapsed. And again, in 1994, state biologists were surprised when their minimum expectations of 30,000 tons of herring weren’t met. Instead, 6,800 tons of herring returned, 20% of them diseased. Despite that, the AP story reported that “biologists are still hoping that enough herring will return soon to the Sound to allow at least some commercial catch.” Priorities.
It took a few years. Finally, in 1996, numbers were on the rise again.
So ADFG went fishing in 1997; they even went a bit over quota. They went fishing in 1998, even though the fish were small and the prices were low. They went fishing even though there hadn’t been a truly successful recruit class since the oil spill. They went fishing even though locals were nervous about it.
They had to call off the fishery in 1999 for insufficient biomass, and there hasn’t been a herring fishery in PWS since.
For decades, ADFG has taken big risks in Southeast Alaska (most notably perhaps in Lynn Canal and Kah Shakes), and these big risks haven’t paid off. ADFG has left a trail of destruction in their wake, and they haven’t been accountable for the harm they’ve done.
ADFG’s model in Sitka Sound doesn’t do enough to account for increased predation. It doesn’t account for the impact on herring of low populations of other important forage fish. It doesn’t account much, if at all, for climate change or for ocean acidification. It makes assumptions about population and stock dynamics that lack sophistication. It disregards important ideas in traditional knowledge about disturbance during spawning, about fish entrainment, about roe quality. It doesn’t account for the possibility of epigenetic effects of a high-stress, high-impact fishery held at a vulnerable time in the herring life cycle.
Thirty years after the spill, there are still plenty of questions about what happened in Prince William Sound. In Sitka, we need to ask if we trust ADFG’s risk assessment. ADFG needs to stop pretending that they have all of the answers they need to safely operate high yield sac roe herring fisheries. Herring populations are sensitive and slow to recover - we need to be more careful.
Peter Bradley, Sitka
