The maximum harvest level for Sitka’s commercial herring fishery has been reduced, despite recent increases in the biomass. State fishery managers point to research from Canada that suggests more caution is needed in setting harvest rates than the 20-percent target used up until now. The Alaska Board of Fisheries adopted the new strategy – to mixed reviews – at its meeting in Ketchikan, which wrapped up on Sunday.
Calls for more conservative management of Sitka’s commercial herring fishery have come to the Alaska Board of Fisheries before, many times. For years, those requests have come from subsistence harvesters who say the management of the fishery has made it harder to access herring eggs, a traditional food for the Lingít people – generally to no avail. But this year, two proposals to reduce the harvest level and raise the threshold for fishing [171, 172] originated within the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Based on state data, Sitka’s herring population has grown. So Board member Tom Carpenter wanted to know, “Why now?”
“If the overall biomass and the GHL that have been set the last five years were just barely above the threshold of 25,000 tons to open the fishery, I could totally understand doing something like this, but I have just not figured out why the Department is bringing this proposal forward right now versus waiting for the next board cycle,” he said.
For the past two decades and more, ADF&G allowed for commercial seiners to harvest up to 20% of the mature herring population in Sitka Sound. But recent data out of Canada suggest a 20% harvest rate may be too high for some herring stocks. So state scientists want to reduce the maximum harvest level to 15 percent. ADF&G biometrician Sherri Dressel said the department wanted to take extra precautions until its own scientists could confirm the Canadian research.
“It’s been a productive number of years so far, and so I fully recognize that it looks incongruous to recommend this now, when the population is doing well. However, part of the research has suggested that herring can switch productivity states quickly,” Dressel said. “The analysis, if we did it, even to do a partial analysis similar to what’s been done in British Columbia would take at least another two board cycles.”
The state’s two proposals would lower the harvest target, and raise the biomass threshold to conduct a commercial fishery. Both were met with mixed enthusiasm. Raymond May is a seiner in the commercial fishery. He said he appreciates ADF&G and trusts the model they use to manage the fishery, but cast doubt on the data from Canada
“They’ve done a great job at managing. I also believe in where their threshold is. I’m trusting their science, but I’m not trusting the harvest rate using data coming out of Canada,” May said. “Canada used to have five fisheries. They’re now down to one. That’s not the place I’m looking to use science from if it’s my opinion.”
Traditional harvester Tom Gamble of Sitka pointed to the state’s overestimate of the mature herring population in 2024, which he said underscored the need for more conservative management.
“When we read in the newspaper that…the fishermen could have targeted 40% of their original GHL under an error, we have to pay attention to that, because Sitkans, Alaskans cannot afford errors in science,” Gamble said. “And so as we speak to threshold levels and other strategies for conservation, we can only hope that they work.”
Dressel called 2024 a “perfect storm” of conditions that led to the state overestimating the herring population by nearly double. The number the department based its record-breaking harvest level of 80,000 tons, which it later learned would have accounted for 40% of the estimated biomass, not 20. But Dressel added that the state’s model accounts for errors like this. She said they knew that the 2024 forecast was more uncertain than most, and fishery managers had that information going into the season.
While seiners only caught a fraction of what they were allocated in 2024, board chair Marit Carlson-Van Dort said she remained concerned about the possibility of the “perfect storm” Dressel described.
“I’m concerned that…there could be an increased frequency of perfect storm conditions, if for no other reason than just the variability in the environmental conditions and the rapid changes that we see in that space,” Carlson-Van Dort said. “So again, I think this just kind of underscores my support and comfort level with going forward with a more conservative management scheme.”
Carlson-Van Dort was one of five board members who voted in favor of ADF&G’s proposals to modify the harvest rates and thresholds for Sitka’s commercial herring fishery.
