Herring Management

Question 1

What is the foundation of coastal food webs?

Answer 1

Herring

Question 2

Why are herring important?

Answer 2

Herring and its roe are critical prey for a host of fish, birds, and marine mammal predators.

Herring is central to the social, cultural, and economic relations of coastal indigenous communities

Herring Roe is a staple food

A cultural keystone of Coastal First Nations

Question 3

What is Shifting Baseline Syndrome?

Answer 3

scientists often measure ecosystem change against their personal recollections of the past

setting inappropriate recovery goals

Herring are a good example

Traditional and local ecological knowledge, as well as paleo- ecological and archaeological data, are important for informing conservation baselines.

• Such data provide local, long-term perspective needed to assess preindustrial ecological states, and ecologically and culturally salient baselines for conservation

Question 4

What is the place name for where we are?

Answer 4

“place for smoked herring”

Question 5

_________ , _________ , and _________ provide powerful set of tools to reimagine what successful herring management looks like.

Answer 5

Archaeology, genetics, and TEK

Question 6

Key concepts from the Herring studies:

Answer 6

study 1:

• 5 regional herring populations in BC
• suggest that locally adapted, distinct regional herring populations may have been more prevalent in the past
• commercial fishing has resulted in severe declines of herring populations, with contemporary populations potentially reflecting only the remnants of a previously more abundant and genetically diverse meta- populations.
• loss of diversity affects ability of herring to adapt to external forces and to rebuild from low population levels
• recognition of locally adapted populations requiring specific management
• high potential for incorporating ancient DNA analyses into modern fisheries management by extending the temporal scale of observation

study 2:

Herring consistently abundant through time

We have been so focused on salmon harvesting that we have under-estimated importance of herring

Question 7

study 3: Herring Cultivation

Answer 7

Cultivation typically involves a set of techniques for negotiating productive relations with autonomous agents rather than merely domesticating them, as in many aquaculture schemes.

Cultivation is not only a means of enhancing ecosystem services but also servicing ecosystems to maintain, restore, or enhance complex social- ecological systems,

  - boosting abundance, predictability, and accessibility 
    of key species.

Question 8

Examples of Herring Cultivation Tlingit and Haida: (4 points)

Answer 8

habitat cultivation:
- improving spawning habitat

showing Respect: Inviting Herring to spawn
- careful arrangement of branches and ceremony

not disturbing spawning areas:
- reducing noise and perturbations in spawning areas to enhance spawn production

zone of viability:
- ex// harvesting eggs 3 ft below the tide line

Question 9

wind of the washing spawn

Answer 9

• Breaks up herring spawn that has clustered too thickly on branches or kelp fronds
• Helps break up or wash away herring eggs in a distributive fashion
• Transplantation of herring eggs learned from observing the herring life cycle and changing patterns of spawn
• Some transplantation techniques may have been learned by observing eagle behaviour
• Practices for transplantation of herring are encoded in stories (Haida Raven story)
• Sometimes took the egg laden kelp and branches from deep water and moved them (wait until the milt cures the egg)
• Many examples of transplanting: key to genetic diversity?

Question 10

foundation to an ecosystem

Answer 10

the co-evolutionary dynamics between human cultivation of seascapes to support foundation species like herring likely contributed to maintaining strong spawning populations of these forage fish, which in turn supported an abundance and diversity of higher trophic level species