By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
With winter winding down, the Department of Fish and Game has launched aerial surveys in search of herring for the spring Sitka Sound sac roe fishery.
Department fishery managers predict a sizable return this year of the older, larger fish that are preferred for the commercial market.
“Aerial surveys have already begun – we’ve flown two of them already, and those will continue to the end of spawning,” area management biologist Aaron Dupuis said Friday in an online preview of the upcoming fishery.
Those flights occurred on March 9 and 12 in fair weather, but no herring were spotted, Fish and Game reported in a news release.
Dupuis told the Sentinel the flight scheduled for today was a “hard maybe,” given current rough weather.
The department anticipates a guideline harvest level of 20,000 tons with an upper limit of 33,304 tons.
No herring fishery has been held the past two years because of smaller herring and market conditions.
On Jan. 11 Fish and Game announced a forecast of 250,468 tons for the spring herring run, with 86 percent of those fish returning as five-year-olds.
Department fisheries scientist Sherri Dressel said the unusually large size of this age component might be related to a spate of warm weather several years ago.
“In 2016 and ’17 there were two back-to-back unusually warm years: in 2016 when the eggs hatched for this cohort and in 2017 when the herring were age one,” Dressel said at the Friday online briefing. “Now, this is not to suggest that temperature was the cause of this large year class – it may have impacted it and it may not have. But what it does show is that there were unusual conditions at the same time that there was also an unusually large year class.”
The average weight estimate for the fish this year is 112 grams.
“(They are) predominantly five-year-olds, and even though I say that the population is coming down, it’s still among the highest that we’ve seen in this time series for Sitka,” Dressel said.
Sitka Tribe of Alaska Resource Protection Director Jeff Feldpausch asked whether the commercial fishery might over-target these larger fish.
Dressel responded that no age class of fish should lose more than a fifth of its number to the commercial harvest.
“None of these age classes will be harvested at or above 20 percent, because the overall harvest rate of the population is 16 percent right now,” she said. “The commercial fishery does select for larger fish. I can also tell you from my projections that even on the older fish we don’t project that the harvest rate will be 20 percent or more.”
On Jan. 14 a Superior Court judge in Juneau heard arguments relating to a subsistence herring lawsuit filed by Sitka Tribe of Alaska.
STA filed its original lawsuit in 2018, claiming that Fish and Game is not ensuring there is a “reasonable opportunity” for subsistence harvest of herring roe on branches, and questioning whether the department is in compliance with its constitutional requirement to provide the best available information to the board of fisheries.
No decision has yet been made, and ADFG officials at Friday’s meeting did not comment on the lawsuit or its potential impact on the commercial fishery.
Looking back on the last two years, department biologist Kyle Hebert noted during the meeting that some aspects of recent herring spawns have been odd.
“Mileage (of spawn on beaches) in both of the years (2019-20) was pretty close to average over the past several decades. In 2019 there was quite a lot of spawn along the Kruzof shoreline, which isn’t very unusual, but what was unusual in 2019 was the near absence of spawn in the central part of the Sound,” Hebert said. “In 2020 spawn returned somewhat to that core area but there was also a substantial shift in spawn to the outside part of Kruzof Island… That is very unusual as well. We really have not documented spawn this far out in these areas before with the exception of one year.”
The department has conducted herring surveys in Sitka Sound for more than 50 years.
Last year, there was so much herring spawn on the outside of Kruzof Island that the department created a new categorization for spawn density on the map, Hebert said.
“In 2020 the egg deposition was so high out on Kruzof Island that I had to create another level on the legend to show what I called ‘Unusually Large,’” Hebert said. “There was tremendous egg deposition all along the southern and the western Kruzof shoreline last year, really like we’ve never seen before,”
On the issue of subsistence herring egg harvest in Sitka Sound, ADF&G Subsistence Resource Specialist Lauren Sill said the number of households that respond to the department’s subsistence herring survey has declined in recent years from the 2005 peak of 159.
“2020, as you can see, is the lowest year on record, but I think that has a lot more to do with the unusual year that 2020 was along with COVID than anything else,” Sill said at the online meeting. “In 2020 because of COVID we didn’t see any of the usual boats that come over from places like Hoonah or Angoon or Hydaburg, who harvest a lot of eggs to take back to their communities to distribute… A lot of the low estimated harvest in 2020 is a result of their absence.”
She stressed the importance of replying to ADFG surveys for the protection of the subsistence priority.
“Really, the best way to protect the subsistence priority is to make sure that there is good data about subsistence harvesting, so I really encourage anyone who is subsistence harvesting to participate in the program,” she said.
Citing survey results from previous years, she noted that the harvest is widely shared.
“It’s pretty consistent that a majority of harvesters share their harvest, whether it’s a good harvest or a bad one,” she said, adding, “A small portion of the harvest weight is kept by the harvester for their own use and about half of it is shared within Sitka and half of it gets shipped out of town… It seems like usually harvesters have a core number of people and relationships that they always share with, no matter the harvest amounts and that those needs are met before the harvester’s own. And if there is more harvest available then the harvester might share with more people or might share more eggs,” Sill said.
STA tribal attorney Diana Bob asked “how does the department- ADFG- plan to assess and consider quality and quantity of spawn on branches during management of the season?”
Bob also inquired how ADFG planned to ensure that subsistence users had reasonable opportunities to conduct their harvest.
Dupuis replied:
“A tangible way the department can really, I think really in season, consider the quality of the subsistence harvest is to consider the proximity of potential fishing boundaries to both active herring spawn and active subsistence sets and spawn on kelp areas,” Dupuis said. “And then we can use that information to use our area authority to separate the commercial fishery from those subsistence activities to hopefully improve the quality of the subsistence harvest.”
